Law & Law Enforcement

Maryland Leaps On The Deadly Abortion Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

When you think about it, this shouldn’t surprise us, as horrible and unethical as it is. The steps from abortion, to late-term abortion, to legal infanticide have always been smaller than abortion advocates have been willing to admit.

In one of the efforts underway in several Democratic-controlled legislatures to protect abortion rights if the Supreme Court alters or strikes down Roe v. Wade, Maryland is considering Senate Bill 669. The bill’s language states, in addition to protecting abortions themselves from prosecution, that no person can be investigated or charged for “experiencing a miscarriage, perinatal death related to failure to act, or stillbirth.”

The perinatal period consists of “the period shortly before and after birth, from the 20th to 29th week of gestation to one to four weeks after birth.” Mark Tapscott concludes,

In other words, it’s anywhere up to four weeks after the birth of the child you and your sexual partner conceived, and you decide you really don’t want the child, hey, no problem, just don’t feed it, don’t get medical care, don’t do a thing. Eventually, the child will die.

And that, under the meaning of the bill’s text, is OK.

The bill, which Tapscott believes is certain to pass and withstand a veto by Maryland’s Republican governor, also bans any investigations into perinatal infant death while creating the private right the right to sue for civil damages if one is investigated for causing a perinatal death through neglect. Continue reading →

First Vice-Presidents And Supreme Court Justices, And Now NFL Offensive Assistant Coaches

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The NFL’s near-complete dearth of ethics alarms is approaching comedic levels, if such a thing could be funny. This week the league that makes billions by paying young men to get a brain disease commanded all 32 NFL teams to hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, as, you’ve got it, another phase of the league’s “diversity” efforts.

The coach can be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund. That’s because they will all be tokens, you see, hired for PR purposes and to avoid lawsuits, so they really aren’t team hires. The new minority coaches “must work closely with the head coach and the offensive staff, with the goal of increasing minority participation in the pool of offensive coaches” that eventually produces the most sought-after candidates for head-coaching positions. In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.

“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. “We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job].” A quota, he means.

And that’s what counts, not putting the best football team on the field. Or something.

In addition to the offensive assistant coach mandate, the new policies in “diversity” also added women to the language of the Rooney Rule at all levels. It will now read that women and/or people of color can satisfy the old Rooney Rule requirement to interview two external minorities for top positions, including head coach. Women are not required to be interviewed, but they are now included in the fulfillment process. It is possible that a team could interview two white women for an open head coach position to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and then make a hire without ever interviewing a person of color.

Why no “differently-abled” coaches? How about blind coaches? Gay coaches? Mentally ill coaches? Little people. Non-English speakers. Mentally-challenged. Surely a trans assistant coach would be historic. Can Lia Thomas play football? Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Sen. Amy Klobuchar

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“The facts are clear here. This is unbelievable. You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice … advocating for overturning a legal election to the sitting president’s chief of staff. She also knows this election — these cases are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him from these decisions.”

—-Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) on ABC’s “This Week,” blathering nonsense to co-anchor Jonathan Karl today, as he, predictably, showed neither the erudition nor the guts to correct he, as she insisted that a conflict of interest that does not exist in law is a “textbook case.”

I was tempted to let the Senator’s outrageous misinformation (Will Twitter suspend her for it? Nah….) slide, except that 1) Too many lawyers and reasonable progressives of my acquaintance settled on her as their favored 2020 Democratic Presidential hopeful, and she said ridiculous things like this throughout the debates, using false certitude for fact and reason, and it ticked me off; 2) her statement isn’t just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, and 3) you know how I hate to see high officials that the public trusts use their megaphones and influence to make it even more ignorant than it already is.

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Ethics Dunce: NY Prosecutor Mark Pomeranz

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Last week, the New York Times and other media gleefully reported that Mark  Pomeranz, one of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who was part of the “Get Trump” effort that has been ongoing in New York almost from the minute he was Trump elected President, believed that the he was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable.” This information came as his resignation letter somehow was released to the press.  Pomeranz submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg stopped pursuing an indictment of Donald Trump. Bragg had picked up the long-running attempt to charge Trump from his predecessor Cyrus Vance, Trump’s own personal Javert, who did not run for re-election.

What neither the Times nor any other source bothered to point out was that Pomeranz’s public statement that Trump was guilty of crimes were bright line violations of prosecutor ethics both in New York and across the profession.

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Go Ahead, I Dare You, I Dare Anyone: Explain The Contrast Between The New York Times Reaction To The Jackson Hearings With Its Response To The Kavanaugh Hearings As Anything But Blatant Partisan Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I’ll admit it: I prepared for this yesterday. I’ll also confess that I post it in part to metaphorically rub the noses of the obstinate New York Times defenders who might visit here in their destructive denials of what is, daily, right in front of their noses.

As I knew it would as surely as I knew the Republican Senators would not do the ethical and statesmanlike thing and be polite, perfunctory and non-confrontational in their examination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, I knew that whatever they did would be attacked by the Times and mainstream news media as racist and hyper-partisan. Thus I tracked down the Times’ story following Justice Kanaugh’s confirmation, from October 6, 2018. You can read it here: Half of the focus was on the fact that his confirmation made the Court dangerously conservative, and not on the Democrats’ despicable smearing of the nominee with a contrived accusation of sexual assault (that supposedly occurred before he attended college or law school, much less before he was a judge).

The other half concentrated on Kavanaugh’s angry attack on the authors of this character assassination attempt, which, sayeth the Times and the anti-Kavanaugh partisan professors it chose to interview, raised questions about his “judicial temperament.” This was the most disgraceful treatment of any Supreme Court nominee ever, before or since, yet no hint of that verdict appeared in the Times.

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Ethics Observations On The Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Senate Hearings, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Post editorial was so ethically awful that it warranted special attention. The rest of the story…

Observations:

1. As I so sagely predicted, the Republican attacks on Jackson have been declared racist by Woke World, democrats and the news media. Here are some of the comment on the Post editorial:

  • “I am reminded of what Jackie Robinson had to go through in 1947 when he broke the color line in baseball. How he had to take every shot, every insult, every racist thing thrown at him without complaint. And now, in 2022, Judge Jackson had to sit there and just take every insulting, despicable, racist and sexist thing thrown at her without being able to call out those who treated her with such bigotry, such callous disrespect.”

  • “Graham, Blackburn, Cruz and other GOP inquisitors know retention of the racist vote is crucial to the election of Republican candidates. They are intent on pandering to that component of Trump’s populist base. The senators’ disrespectful treatment of Judge Jackson doubtlessly did much to retain that base support.”
  • “Come on. “Not all Republicans are racists” is so 2016. ANYONE and I mean anyone who votes for a Republican in 2022 is a racist. Period. Maybe not fully racist meaning gee, they might have concerns about inflation or whatever, but racist in the end. R = RACIST.”

Nothing any of the Republicans said to or about Jackson was racist, but it doesn’t matter. The tough questioning served no purpose, but helped bolster the “Republicans/conservatives are racists” Big Lie. The justification was “tit for tat.” It is incompetent politics, particularly at a time when minorities are increasingly open to conservative candidates. Continue reading →

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Pledges To Recuse Herself From The Harvard University Affirmative Action Case

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

And that, as they say, is that.

I was wrong, Prof. Turley was right. He was certain that Jackson would recuse from the case because of the screaming conflict she faced by sitting on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He wrote,

“It would be profoundly inappropriate for a jurist to sit on a case for a school in which she has held a governing position and a role in setting institutional policies. This would be akin to a justice sitting on a case on oil leases for Exxon while being a member of the oil company’s board of directors.”

I wrote, “That’s exactly right. But I bet Jackson doesn’t recuse.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Maybe The Year): Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going to go back and kill Americans. It won’t bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That’s a better outcome than letting them go. And if it costs $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail. Because they’re going to go back to the fight. Look at the fricken Afghan government that’s made up of former detainees at Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain’t working.”

Senator Lindsey Graham in a meltdown at the confirmation hearing for SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, before walking out in a tizzy.

Hmmm. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that high ranking elected officials from both political parties appear to have little regard for core Constitutional principles? I’m going out on a limb here by stating that it’s a bad thing.

In fact, it is terrible.

Graham, an alleged conservative, proudly went on record as supporting “pre-crime” punitive measures (Watch “Minority Report” for a fair assessment of how that works) along with a pure “ends justifies the means” endorsement, spiced up by some “if it saves just one life” false logic. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Laurence Silberman

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“The latest events at Yale Law School in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech prompts me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified for potential clerkships.”

—Judge Silberman in a letter to his fellow judges, in reference to the disruption of a March 10 panel at Yale Law School that was intended as a debate over civil liberties  hosted by the Yale Federalist Society. About a hundred students attempted to prevent the panel and Federalist Society members in attendance from speaking.

Well, you know: Yale. Equally disturbing, perhaps, was that Ellen Cosgrove, the law school’s associate dean, attended the panel, was present the entire time, and did nothing to restrain the protesters nor remind them of their ethical duties.

The school has a policy that specifically condemns such speech-chilling conduct, but more than 10 days after the event, no consequences appear to be forthcoming for the privileged and arrogant thugs who are going to be entrusted with the task of protecting future attacks on Constitutional liberties.

In an editorial endorsing the judge’s suggestion, the Wall Street Journal wrote in part,

Some readers may think these students should be forgiven the excesses of youth. But these are adults, not college sophomores. They are law students who will soon be responsible for protecting the rule of law. The right to free speech is a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution. If these students are so blinkered by ideology that they can’t tolerate a debate over civil liberties on campus, the future of the American legal system is in jeopardy.

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Bias Makes You Stupid, And Only Bias Can Explain Why A Prosecutor Would Argue That It Is Unethical To Ask a Juror About His Biases

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Perhaps you have heard that a juror who joined in the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s henchwoman when he was luring young women into his sex-trafficking hobby had thrown her trial into limbo after admitting that he made a teeny, weenie, innocent “mistake” during the crucial jury selection process. The man identified as “Juror 50” told a federal judge in Manhattan that he had read too quickly through a pretrial screening questionnaire that asked potential jurors whether they had ever been sexually abused. This would seem to be a rather important question for jurors about to fairly judge, bias-free, a woman accused of helping to turn young women into virtual sex slaves for a sick billionaire and his pals, wouldn’t you think? Juror 50—his friends call him “Fif”—-checked a box indicating “no.” Here he is in a high profile trial in which justice for dozens of Epstein’s young victims as well as the freedom of the defendant is at stake, and the guy picks this as a good time to start practicing his speed-reading.

“This was one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in my life,” Fifty told Judge Alison Nathan, during an hour-long hearing. “I didn’t lie in order to get on this jury.” That’s funny: it sure looks like he did. Thanks to 50’s ridiculous breach of responsibility, duty and competence, Maxwell, who was convicted on December 29 last year of sex-trafficking more, might walk free despite helping Epstein recruit, groom and sexually abuse underage girls for at least a decade. In deliberations.

Juror 50 revealed that during deliberations he told other jurors that he was a victim of childhood sexual abuse himself, and after the trial told the news media that he had helped other jurors understand things “from a victim’s point of view.” Now he claims that he made “an honest mistake.” It may have been honest, but it was neither ethical nor excusable. He’s tap-dancing as fast as he can because he falsely signed a document made under oath, and faces fines and imprisonment.

He should get both, just as Epstein’s co-monster deserves a new trial that doesn’t include a hidden sexual abuse activist on the jury.

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