The astounding indifference to both human life and their duties displayed by the EMTs in yesterday’s incident in Brooklyn relates directly to the title of this blog. Why…why…didn’t their ethics alarms go off when they knew that a young, pregnant woman was fighting for her life a few yards away? What could have dulled their senses of duty and humanity, disabled them, to this extent? Continue reading
Professions
A Mother Dies as EMTs Munch Bagels: Why?
In Brooklyn, New York, a pregnant woman went into cardiac arrest in front of two EMT’s having breakfast at a coffee shop. They did nothing to help her, despite entreaties from others at the shop, reportedly because they were “on break.” And she died.
You can bank on hearing a lot more about the horrific incident in the coming days and weeks. Normally an obvious example of miserable human conduct wouldn’t be mentioned here, because there is no ethical controversy to consider. This one, however, raises important questions that have to be answered:
- What kind of cultural values are lurking beneath the surface of our society that would lead two individuals to be so callous to endangered human life when they had the skill and responsibility to act? One person could be an aberration, but two suggests a much larger problem.
- How can people capable of such conduct be recruited and employed by any Fire Department, anywhere?
- It will be easy to heap condemnation on the two EMT’s who preferred to finish their bagels rather than to save a mother’s life. That won’t address the more important question of what we can and must do, not just to prevent anything like this happening again, but to identify and eradicate the toxic values in our society that could allow this to happen even once.
One thing seems certain: New York’s famous Christmas spirit isn’t what it used to be.
The Legal Ethics Forum’s Top Stories of 2009
It is the time for year-end lists—Ethics Alarms will post its 2009 ethics award winners soon—and one of the best is out. From the always excellent Legal Ethics Forum comes legal ethics ace John Steele’s list of the Top Legal Ethics Stories of 2009. Even though John left out my personal favorite, it is a thorough and enlightening compendium. Even if you aren’t a lawyer (perhaps especially if you aren’t!), it is worth reading. Something on his list will affect your life sooner or later, if it hasn’t already.
The Ethics of Letting a Lying Defendant Testify
It’s snowing like crazy outside, and I’m stuck putting the lights on a nine-foot tree. My only escape from the pine needles assaulting my tender skin is ethics reverie, and I find myself thinking, once again, about the classic criminal defense attorney’s ethical challenge:
What do you do when your guilty client wants to claim he’s innocent in the witness chair, under oath? Continue reading
The Leaked Exam: Teaching Ethics Unethically
Some University of Oregon law students preparing for exams when the full text of an exam for one of their classes, Administrative Law with Professor John Bonine, inexplicably appeared on a university list-serve. Someone in the registrar’s office had pushed the wrong button.
Oops! Yay? Uhhh…now what? Continue reading
Law Students, Lawyers and Judges With Broken Ethics Alarms, 2009
I won’t keep you in suspense: my favorite is the Harvard law school whiz who celebrated his job offer from a top law firm by getting drunk and burning down a church. Forgot to check the batteries in the ol’ ethics alarm, I guess!
Here are two cautionary end-of-year lists: from the Avvo blog, the “Top Lawyers Behaving Badly” list for 2009, and, though not rich a source for black humor, the even more disturbing “Year’s Most Infamous Lawyers” from the Business Insider.
Ethics Alarms thanks Robert Ambrogi for finding them, as well the Avvo and the Business Insider for doing such an excellent job of compiling them.
When Money Curdles Ethics
A stimulating ethics alarm drill surfaced over at Freakonomics, where Stephen Dubner challenged the site’s readers to help him compile a list of goods, services and activities that one can legally give away or perform gratis, but that when money changes hands, the transactions become illegal. It is a provocative exercise, especially when one ponders why the addition of money should change the nature of the act from benign to objectionable in the view of culture, society, or government. It is even more revealing to expand the list to include uses of money that may not create illegality, but which change an act from ethical to unethical. Continue reading
Who Do You Trust? Gallup Says…
According to the annual Gallup poll on the public’s perceptions of ethical conduct among professionals, the following is the ranking, best to worst, of those most trusted by the American public. The percentage is the proportion of poll respondents who ranked each profession “very high” or “high” in ethical standards. Continue reading
The Arnie Becker Rule [Updated 12/11/16]
For about 20 years, the consensus has been building in the legal profession that a lawyer sleeping with his clients is not only a bad idea, but also should be prohibited by the formal ethics rules. States like California, Oregon and New York quickly adopted such a rule while other bars resisted; when the ABA added the “no sex with clients” provision to is Model Rule 1.8 in 2003, more states followed suit. Now Virginia, one of the most respected bars in the country, is considering its first pronouncement on the subject, in the form of a formal ethics opinion. Continue reading
Student Booze, the Police, and the Facebook Mole
The battle to define what is right and wrong regarding social networking sites continues. The Philadelphia Bar Association has decided that it is an ethics violation for a lawyer to recruit someone to make a Facebook “friend request” to a witness to pass on to the lawyer the contents of the witness’s Facebook page. The ethics committee wrote that this was dishonest conduct by the lawyer even though the witness willingly accepted the fake “friend” and would have accepted almost anyone who asked. The same tactic was pulled on University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer, who has over 400 Facebook friends and who accepted a friend request by an attractive young woman he didn’t know because, well, she was an attractive young woman. She was working for the police, however, and found photos on the site of Adam and a friend, Tyrell Luebker, with adult beverages in hand. They both were ticketed for underage drinking, and ended up paying a fine. Continue reading
