Professions

Now THESE Are Unethical (California) Lawyers…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Famed California trial attorney Tom Girardi was accused of stealing more than $18 million from clients; I was late to the metaphorical party, not covering the long-running ethics scandal until a month ago. (Sorry.)The State Bar of California had opened 205 disciplinary investigations in 40 years against Girardi, but he ducked accountability until the very end, in part because of pay-offs to bar staff.

One of several new regulations designed to prevent future Girardis is the Client Trust Account Protection Program. That requires the state’s lawyers to report whether they are responsible for client trust accounts, to provide basic account information, to complete an annual self-assessment, and to certify that they comply with ethics rules related to safeguarding client funds. The point, of course, is to stop lawyers from stealing from their clients. There are a lot of unethical practices lawyers get away with, but not taking proper care of client funds is supposed to be the third rail of lawyer misconduct.

The deadline for compliance with Client Trust Account Protection Program was April 3, 2023. Lawyers who failed to comply were fined $75 and had until June 30 to meet the regulations. Suspensions began in July. The results: 1,641 California lawyers have had their licenses suspended.

This is not a good sign.

Now THIS Is An Unthical Judge…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In fact, “unethical” doesn’t do her justice.

A courtroom security camera caught Lincoln County (Oklahoma) District Judge Traci Soderstrom during a murder trial as she paged through her iPhone, checking Facebook, surfing the web, and texting as the trial went on, supposedly under her supervision. This continued for hours. The case involved the brutal murder of Braxton Danker, 2, who was beaten to death by 32-year-old Khristian Tyler Martzall. Soderstrom ordered the jury at the outset of the trial to turn off their phones. “This will allow you to concentrate on the evidence without interruption,” intoned the judge. Then she had her own eyes glued to her phone screen during opening statements and witness testimony.

After the video was discovered, the judge dealt with the scandal by having camera moved rather than try to explain or apologize for her behavior.

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This Biased Journalism Fiasco Explains So Much It Should Be Taught In Journalism AND Ethics Classes

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! And sure, journalism is a profession! You can always trust journalism icons!

No…no…and no.

Business Insider published an alleged news article headlined, “More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021.” Part of the ongoing effort on both the political Rights and the Left to sink Florida Governor Ron DiSantis’s chances of keeping Donald Trump off the GOP 2024 Presidential ticket, the story claimed to debunk the conventional wisdom that the ultra Woke states are bleeding residents while DiSantis’s state’s population is growing. 674,740 residents left Florida, BI told us, exceeding the total of 433,402 residents who had fled California and the 287,249 residents moving out of New York.

It was pure confirmation bias. The stats were unbelievable on their face, but the Business Insider staff believed them anyway, because they wanted to. After being roundly smacked on social media, BI reversed itself with a replacement post headlined, “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021,” that revealed,

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Ethics Dunce: Power Line

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The tweet above is a joke, and announces itself as one. What makes the joke especially funny is that it is conceivable that New York’s ridiculous, socialist, Dunning-Kruger victim Congresswoman would really say something like this. That is also why it is extremely important ethically for the satire account’s tweets to make it clear that its output is parody.

The site does that. The account has the handle @AOCpressTwo and the username Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody). Its bio reads, “I’m the boss – you mad bro? (parody)” (www.twitter.com/AOCpressTwo).

However, in conservative website Power Line’s weekly collection of memes, cartoons and jokes covering the previous seven days’ events from a rightish perspective, it includes this version of the tweet:

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Now THAT’S An Unethical Lawyer…And Maybe Two

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that lawyer James Saunders, who previously worked for the Internal Revenue Service, violated the law by voting twice in both the 2020 and 2022 national elections. His public defender Scott Roger Hurley—he’s on the right above— is arguing that his client should be acquitted because it was “an accident.” “Mistakes do happen, accidents do happen,” he told the court.

Suuuuure.

Saunders voted in two separate locations in two separate states: Cuyahoga County in Ohio, and Broward County in Florida, and in both elections. “The fact that you do that in consecutive general elections I think takes ‘accident’ to the land of imaginary doubt, and not reasonable doubt,” the prosecutor said.

Ya think?

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Falsely Describing Bad Research To Advocate Irresponsible Policies Is No Way To Serve On The Supreme Court, Justice Jackson…[Corrected And Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE: A critical Ethics Alarms reader informed me that in his view the text of this post was too similar to that of its main source, The Daily Signal, in an article by Jay Greene. Although I linked to the piece and also credited Greene with a quote, upon reviewing the post I agree that it included too many substantially similar sentences and phrasings. I apologize to the Daily Signal, Jay, and Ethics Alarms readers. I was using several articles in preparing the piece (including one from another source that was also extremely close to the Signal article), and for whatever reason, did not notice that I had leaned so heavily on Green’s phrasing. It has happened before over the past 13 years, though not often, and never with the intention to deceive. Thus I have revised the post; in the future, if anyone feels that an Ethics Alarms article does not properly credit sources or seems insufficiently original, the favored response is to alert me, rather than to accuse me in obnoxious terms of “plagiarism.”

Fans of affirmative action reacted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s depressing defense of racial discrimination by praising her remarkably hypocritical dissent in the recent 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court declaring Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies unconstitutional. Those who believe that Justices should base their analyses on law rather than group loyalties were appropriately critical. Both, however missed some really ugly trees for the metaphorical forest, as Jackson injected false statistics into her dissent. They were, of course—we’re used to this phenomenon—uncritically accepted and used in subsequent media propaganda condemning the decision.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in part,

“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

Wow! Racial discrimination saves lives! The problem, or rather problems, are that as Jay Greene of the Daily Signal points out, 1) the claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians attending is based on a misleading analysis 2) Even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were as Justice Jackson claimed, they are unbelievable and 3) even if Jackson had described the results of the study accurately, and even if those results were credible, they still wouldn’t justify the use of racial preferences in medical school admissions.

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Ethics Observations On The Left’s Unethical Three Freakout Day

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yesterday’s clean and persuasive Supreme Court decision finally striking down racial discrimination in university admissions after decades of pretending it wasn’t the Consitutional offense it was was followed by two more sound Constitution-based decisions that were as important as they were necessary. All three were quickly attacked as “partisan” and “extreme” when they were neither, except to those who find the boundaries imposed by our nation’s traditional democratic principles overly obstructive to their schemes.

Finally ruling on a lawsuit brought by six state governments, the Supreme Court rejected President Biden’s insane $430 billion student loan forgiveness plan as illegal because it was never authorized by Congress. In a cynical, Harry Reid-ish strategem to buy the 2022 mid-term elections, Biden had announced a $430 billion gift to mostly middle-class and wealthy citizens who were unable or unwilling to do what millions of Americans in their exact situation had done: paying back money they owed for a benefit they had received. In many ways it was progressive irresponsible government at its worst. The Constitution gives Congress, not the the White House,the power to determine how federal funds are spent. As Illya Somin wrote yesterday, “If the administration had won, Biden and future presidents would have been empowered to use vague statutes to usurp Congress’ constitutional control over the federal budget. Moreover, because of the context for this case, it also would have allowed the president to abuse emergency powers for partisan ends.”

The “partisan” accusation was especially dishonest (Vox: “The Supreme Court’s lawless, completely partisan student loans decision, explained”) since that famous right-wing partisan Nancy Pelosi had endorsed the position of the SCOTUS majority just two years ago, saying, “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” Chief Justice Roberts included her statement in his opinion for the majority, but facts don’t matter. The increasingly unhinged progressive mob, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, pronounced the decision the product of an “extreme” conservative majority running amuck.

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This Is How The Dean Of Berkeley Law School Teaches Ethics To His Students…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Nice. Violate the law, ignore basic fairness, and honesty, but as long as you don’t tell anyone and can’t be caught, it’s okay.

Chemerinsky is a well-established partisan hack whose legal commentary is almost always polluted by his leftist agenda, but this was low even for him. Do you ever wonder where unethical lawyers come from?

Classes like his.

And professors like him. Yale Law School’s Dean, Georgetown Law Center’s Dean, and others supposedly overseeing the training of tomorrow’s legal professionals have similarly made it clear with their actions and words that ethics are secondary to their political and social agendas. None have done so quite as flagrantly and smugly as Chemerinsky, however.

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Incompetent Elected Official): Vice-President Kamala Harris, Part 2: Harris Has Directly Violated California’s Legal Ethics Rules

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

There is another aspect of Kamala Harris’s attack on the Supreme Court majority on Dobbs that bears noting.

In most jurisdictions, a lawyer may not publicly impugn the integrity of a sitting judge, and certainly not a Supreme Court Justice.

Here is the relevant rule in California, one of the jurisdictions with the duty to oversee her conduct. California’s position is that a member of its bar is subject to California rules no matter when the lawyer violates them.

Rule 8.2 Judicial Officials – State Bar of California:

(a) A lawyer shall not make a statement of fact that the lawyer knows* to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge or judicial officer, or of a candidate for election or appointment to judicial office.

Comment “To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers.”

If there is a California lawyer reading who wants to take a stand for the integrity of the ethics rules, a formal complaint to the would be apt and appropriate.

[The graphic above represents my assessment of the likelihood that the California Bar would ever enforce its rules against a good, abortion-loving Democrat for attacking the U.S. Supreme Court.]

A Barn Door Fallacy Classic From California

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

California was the only U.S. jurisdiction that had no version of American Bar Association Rule 8.3, which reads in part, “A lawyer who knows that another lawyer has committed a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects, shall inform the appropriate professional authority.”

“Shall” means must, and thus, theoretically, a lawyer who does not report a lawyer for misconduct that amounts to a serious legal ethics violation is himself or herself committing such a violation as well. That’s the theory.

The California legal community has just gone through a spectacular scandal. Tom Girardi, a famous and much-acclaimed plaintiffs trial lawyer, was disbarred after it was discovered that he had defrauded many clients and illegally obtained millions of dollars in the process. The California bar’s investigation report was horrific: his corrupt activities were successful for so long in part because he recruited—and bribed—members of the State Bar leadership and the organization’s employees. Over a hundred lawsuits had been filed against Girardi by clients for misappropriation of funds, but his record with the Bar remained pristine.

Shortly after the ugly story broke, California began to take steps to add some form of 8.3 to its Rules of Professional Conduct governing the ethics of its members, a cynical and useless move designed to appear responsible. It was also an example of what Ethics Alarms calls “The Barn Door Fallacy,” a phenomenon most common today in the area of post-tragedy gun legislation. After a high-profile disaster, the response is to “do something” that supposedly would have prevented the disaster if it had been in place earlier. Usually, as in this case, the reality is that it would not.

Rule 8.3 is something of an illusion anyway. Bar associations are reluctant to second guess a member and punish him or her for their personal assessments of what kind of conduct constitutes “raising a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects.” Stealing money from a client is definitely in that category, but proving that another lawyer “knows” about such conduct as opposed to “suspecting” it is not easy. Most bar counsel have no stomach for it, and prosecutions are absurdly rare.

The fact that 8.3 is called the “Snitch Rule” in the profession tells you how most lawyers feel about it. In general, lawyers tend to make ethics complaints to their bars about adversaries. Blowing the whistle on one’s own firm member, a powerful partner, a close colleague or a friend is rarer than—well, pick your metaphor, I’m not feeling clever today.

To see how the news out of California is even less than meets the eye, note how the state’s version of 8.3 is narrower than any other state. It reads,

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