Not a surprise, but still an ominous trend...
As usual, those polled were asked, “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low or very low?”
Professions
Now THAT’s an Incompetent Lawyer! “Now What?” Asks His Death Row Inmate Client…
Joseph Gamboa, marked for execution in Texas, is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to save his life. His argument is that a court-appointed lawyer was so inept that he killed his chance to challenge his murder conviction in federal court. The Supreme Court is will examine this week whether justice was done in Gamboa’s case even though his attorney made one botch after another. Indeed, he could hardly have done worse if he had the Ghostbusters’ lawyer (Rick Moranis) from “Ghostbusters 2.”
Gamboa was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for two murders during a robbery, but he swears that he is innocent. His court-appointed lawyer, John J. Ritenour Jr., met with Gamboa only once, the condemned man argues in his SCOTUS brief, then filed a habeas petition. At that single meeting, Gamboa says he brought documents that indicated prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence (a Brady violation!) that another man had committed the killings. Ritenour did not take the documents, Gamboa’s brief says. In a sworn statement, Gamboa stated that “Mr. Ritenour told me that he had read the state court record in my case and believed I was guilty.”
It took Ritenour almost a year to filed the habeus corpus petition, and it was a hack job. The petition was cut-and-pasted from an earlier one for another client, even repeating the same typos and grammatical errors. It even featured the name of the other client, Obie Weather, where the lawyer hadn’t quite finished proof-reading. Nor was the document signed by Gamboa, a requirement. Gamboa says that the petition did not include any of the arguments they had discussed…understandable, since the document was basically copied from a different case.
Fani Willis’s Sermon
It is beginning to look like Fani Willis, Georgia’s African-American Democrat Fulton County prosecutor who pledged to “get” Donald Trump, really is involved in a serious conflict of interest involving the case and even criminal conduct. The mainstream media is taking notice, it is no longer a “right wing conspiracy theory,” and most interestingly, Willis has not denied the allegations, which appeared in a court filing.
The New York Times published a story headlined “Atlanta D.A. Defends Qualifications of Outside Lawyer She Hired for Trump Case/At a historic Black church, Fani T. Willis pushed back against an accusation that Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she brought on, was unqualified for the job” in which we learn that Willis spoke yesterday before the congregation of one of the oldest Black churches in Atlanta, which had invited her to be the keynote speaker for a service dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She did not mention the details of allegations that she is in an intimate relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired in 2021 for the Trump-getting, and has earned more than $650,000 in the job to date with some of the lucre benefiting her directly. Instead, she said in part,
“Wait a minute, God! You did not tell me,” she added, “as a woman of color it would not matter what I did — my motive, my talent, my ability and my character would be constantly attacked….A divorced single mom who doesn’t belong to the right social groups, who doesn’t necessarily come from the right family, doesn’t have the right pedigree — the assignment was just too high for lowly me. All I brought to the table, God, is my mind, my heart, my work ethic, my undying love for people and the community.”
“Baseball Super-Agent Scott Boras Has Another Super-Conflict And There Is No Excuse For It,” The Sequel
Sharp-eyed Ethics Alarms readers who pay attention to my baseball posts might recognize this one. It is like the most inexcusable lazy Hollywood franchise film, a sequel that is nearly identical to the original. I’m going to see how much of the post’s predecessor I can duplicate without having to change anything
Twelve years ago, Ethics Alarms began a post about baseball agents in general and Scott Boras in particular engaging in a flaming conflict of interest that harmed their player clients this way…
Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.
I could have written that paragraph today. Nothing has changed. Literally nothing: as baseball general managers huddle with player agents in baseball’s off-season and sign players to mind-blowing contracts, the unethical tolerance of players agents indulging in and profiting from a classic conflict of interest continues without protest or reform.
I may be the only one who cares about the issue. I first wrote about it here, on a baseball website. I carried on my campaign to Ethics Alarms, discussing the issue in 2010, 2011 (that’s where the linked quote above comes from), 2014, 2019, and in 2019 again, and last year, in 2022. There is no publication or website that has covered the issue as thoroughly as this one, and the unethical nature of the practice is irrefutable. But I might as well be shouting in outer space, where no one can hear you scream. The conflict of interest, which is throbbingly obvious and easy to address, sits stinking up the game. Continue reading
Dentist Ethics Drill! [Multiple Updates and Corrections]
This is a bridge from the previous post, since it also involves Minnesota, and gives some teeth to my argument that the Land o’ Lakes is facing a brush with ethics decay. At the root of our tale some yawning cavities in the ethical hygiene of a dental professional. (Note my generous restraint in leaving quite a few potential puns for you to add in the comments. Consider the challenge a moment of tooth, er, truth.)
But I digress. Dr. Kevin Molldrem and Molldrem Family Dentistry face a lawsuit from a disgruntled patient, Kathleen Wilson, who claims the Eden Prairie dentist harmed her in the process of performing over 30 dental procedures in a single five hour appointment. Molldrem, she alleges, put in eight crowns, did four root canals and filled the cavities in 20 teeth during a single visit in July 2020. In the process, according to the lawsuit, Molldrem used anesthesia “well in excess of (the) recommended dosage” and engaged in “falsifying medical records” regarding the amount administered.
Update 1: I finally have the complaint (thanks to JutGory). The news reports did not accurately convey the sense of the lawsuit, concentrating excessively on the sensational feature of all that dental work at a single session. The complaint’s complaints are:
—“Plaintiff has incurred and will continue to incur medical costs for the dental care required to address the harms caused by Dr. Molldrem’s negligence.”
—“Plaintiff has incurred and will continue to incur lost income and loss of earning capacity as a direct result of Dr. Molldrem’s negligence.”
—“Plaintiff has endured and will continue to endure pain and suffering, embarrassment, emotional distress, and disfigurement as a direct result of Dr. Molldrem’s negligence.”
Update 2: The complaint also accuses the dentist of failing “to create a care plan that would effectively address decay and tooth dissolution” and “failing to control gingival inflammation and bleeding” during the lengthy visit. That’s the harm alleged, as well as damage that required repair by other dentists. Based on what was revealed about the suit in the media and the fact that the expert report for the plaintiff mentions “trauma,” discomfort” and “anxiety,” I assumed that pain and suffering were also alleged in the suit, as they virtually always are when medical negligence is involved. And sure enough, they were. However, my statement in the original post that the suit claims the dentist’s marathon session “caused great pain and suffering” was speculation stated as fact, so I’ve removed it.
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Now THIS is an Unethical Lawsuit (But Not Frivolous!)
The Hershey company (in Hershey, Pa.) has been sued by Cynthia Kelly in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida on behalf of herself and everyone who purchased Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Halloween candies advertised as pumpkins and white ghosts. The class action lawsuit seeks $5 million in damages and a court order requiring the company to change its advertising next year so purchasers won’t feel that they have been victimized by a bait-and-switch. It alleges that Hershey falsely advertised the seasonal candy as having “explicit carved” out designs, and there were no such carvings in the actual products.
Kelly’s complaint says that she purchased a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter pumpkins for $4.49 at an Aldi’s last October 2023 because she was impressed by the artistic carvings depicted in the advertisements and the packaging, and would not have bought the candy if she knew that it was uncarved. And she wasn’t alone in this painful disappointment, as shown by comments on Hershey YouTube ads written by heart-broken candy-lovers:
If You Are Troubled By The Ferguson Effect, Wait Until The Aurora Effect Kicks In
The surge in homicides following the Michael Brown fiasco in Ferguson, Missouri sparked a debate about whether the demonizing of police by the news media, lawyers seeking quick liability pay-outs every time a perp was killed in a confrontation with police, and progressive politicians demonstrations, and the anti-police hostility they engendered triggered the murder spike. City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald, among others, identified a “Ferguson Effect,” in which police were pushed into passive law enforcement for fear of criminal prosecutions primed by political factors and the kind of life- and career-wrecking publicity that savaged Officer Darren Wilson, who was found by a grand jury to be blameless in Brown’s shooting. Since that 2014 ethics train wreck, the Ferguson Effect has metastasized thanks to the George Floyd freakout, the Black Lives Matters riots, and the conviction and imprisonment of the group officers involved. It is indisputable that proactive law enforcement is dangerous now both in the streets and in the aftereffects when events turn ugly.If police are going to be sitting ducks for moral luck prosecutions, it requires a martyr or a fool to take the kinds of risks today’s social and legal climate engenders.
Next up on the metaphorical social justice shooting gallery: paramedics.
Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”
The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”
Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:
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Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.
Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?
Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.
- You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
- You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
- Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
- If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
- Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.
There are a couple obvious options.
The American Bar Association Reminds Me Why I Am No Longer A Member
Ethics duncery, abuse of influence, cowardice, bias…oh, lots of things.
The president of the American Bar Association, Mary Smith, leaped onto the careering Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck on behalf of the organization she leads, issuing a statement two days after the October 7 terrorist attack on music festival attendees in Israel that said,
“The American Bar Association unequivocally condemns the attacks of Hamas on Israeli citizens that have killed hundreds. The kidnapping of helpless civilians by Hamas—including women and children abducted at gunpoint—for use in Gaza as hostages and human shields violates international laws. Brutal attacks on civilians are never a solution to disputes or a justifiable way to air grievances. Israel and the Palestinians have had long-running disagreements and differences, but that in no way justifies the actions of Hamas. The state of Israel has the right to exist, and its citizens are entitled to live in safety and peace. The ABA calls on both sides to show restraint to spare the lives of the innocent people caught up in these attacks. The ABA also calls for all hostages to be released and for all parties to stop hostilities and settle their disputes in a peaceful and legal fashion and with the rule of law.”
For a lawyer (and the supposedly most prestigious lawyer organization), that’s an astoundingly self-contradictory statement. Despite giving lip service to the obvious definition of a terror attack on civilians as unjustifiable, the statement goes on to claim that Israel has no right to respond to the attack as an act of war, calling for a “peaceful solution” while implying that any armed response will breach “the rule of law.” Then she struck again on October 17, writing that the ABA,
A Teachers’ Union Reveals What It Is, Suddenly Decides To Take It All Back And Pretend It Didn’t Mean It
…thus raising the immediate question of whether parents and particularly Jews are as dumb as the teachers apparently think they are. We shall see.
The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers passed a resolution on Oct. 25th to “condemn the role our [America] government plays in supporting the system of Israeli occupation and apartheid, which lies at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” In addition, the resolution demanded that Minnesota lawmakers repeal the state’s anti-BDS legislation.
Not surprisingly, there was a massive negative reaction to the October resolution because it revealed that a majority of the teachers in the union were..
- Anti-Semitic.
- Ignorant
- Completely in thrall to anti-white, anti-democratic ideology
- Excessively concerned with woke politics than with education, and
- Not sufficiently trustworthy to be teaching children.
- Missing basic ethics alarms.
Oopsie! The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas sent a letter signed by over 800 citizens to interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and the MPS school board protesting in part,
Ethics Alarms 