U.S. Society

The Eventual Firing of Daniel Picca: Why Our Children Are Not Safe In Public School

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Wait…is that a CHILD’S hand?

Today, in a scathing editorial, the Washington Post related the shocking story of the firing of Daniel Picca, a Montgomery County, Maryland  elementary school teacher who was suspected by school officials of having inappropriate relations with male students since at least 1995. This was, said the Post, ” a stinging indictment of a school bureaucracy that for almost two decades believed it had a problem but reacted with a seemingly endless flow of ineffective warnings, letters, reprimands and — most appalling — reassignments of the teacher to other schools and other students.” Montgomery County, it should be noted, boasts of one of the finest public school systems in the nation….or so we have been told.

Picca, as was detailed by a hearing examiner  in 2010 and by an administrative law judge this year, had been warned for 17 years about his conduct with young boys, including inappropriate touching, having students sit on his lap, “wrestling” with the boys and inviting some to an extracurricular “Strong Boys Club” of his own invention, where he encouraged male students to remove their shirts, according to student testimony. In 1995, county child protective services  said that Picca was responsible for “indicated child abuse.”The school system now says it missed this, somehow—not that it didn’t have plenty of evidence already. Continue reading →

Nakoula’s Arrest and Imprisonment: The Big Chill [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

More than a week ago, one of my blogging, legal, ethics idols, Ken at Popehat, took issue with my post stating that the midnight questioning of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (the alleged producer of “Innocence of Muslims,” the crude anti-Islam film then being blamed by the Obama administration for all the violence that erupted in the Middle East on September 11) would appear both abroad and at home to be in retaliation for his exercise of his free speech rights, and should have been avoided even if it was otherwise justified by his parole violations. Ken wrote:

“…What separates us from the mob is the rule of law. We shouldn’t ignore the rule of law by violating First Amendment principles in what Eugene Volokh correctly points out would be an utterly vain attempt to appease a mob. On the other hand, we shouldn’t hinder the rule of law to avoid the appearance of appeasement, either. That’s still letting the mob dictate our actions and our adherence to our own laws. “We would normally do X, but we mustn’t because it might enrage the mob” is just the flip side of “We would normally do X, but we mustn’t because it might embolden the mob.” Both are a sucker’s game. The mob’s actions are going to be driven by its own culture and by the people manipulating the mob for their own political gain. Jack, and others, seem to be saying that the mob will misunderstand the orderly administration of the law in this instance: but is there really any chance that the mob will ever make an honest attempt to understand, or will care, or that the forces manipulating them will react honestly? Respect the rule of law and fuck ’em if they don’t like it.”

On this blog, commenter tgt was more succinct:

“Jack’s view of law is that if you are enough of a dick, you should be immune from prosecution for any action.” Continue reading →

“And Now We Welcome You To Another Episode of “As The Media Shrugs”! Elizabeth Faces Exposure As a Dishonest and Unlicensed Lawyer…Will She Finally Reveal The Truth? Will Voters Care?”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Nope, no way to Texas; can’t get to New Jersey…maybe I should just bite the bullet and get a Massachusetts law license? Nawww, who’s going to care?”

No major newspapers or broadcast news outlets seem to care, but what was originally dismissed as a partisan blogger’s over-reaching accusation has been bolstered by more than one smoking gun, proving Elizabeth Warren’s untrustworthiness and lack of fitness for high office.

Robert Eno of Red Mass Group, who joins Prof. William Jacobson as a blogger doing dogged and necessary research on the Massachusetts Senate candidate, has convincingly shown that Warren’s justification of her practice in Massachusetts, sans law license, doesn’t work, because what she says can’t possibly be true.

Earlier this week, Warren tried to rebut Jacobson’s allegations by explaining, “I haven’t practiced any law since 2010 since I went down to do the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I’ve been a member of the bar in Texas for all of my career, in the Supreme Court bar, and until a few weeks ago the bar in New Jersey.” Warren and her defenders also argued that Jacobson’s claim that she was operating a regular law office out of her Harvard faculty office, which would make her an unlicensed Massachusetts practitioner, was inaccurate. Warren periodically was involved in cases in Federal court, which did not require a  Massachusetts license, they said. All that was necessary for Warren to appear before various Federal Courts was for her to be duly licensed in a state or territory, and file a statutory request to the court to appear.

Warren’s problem: it is beginning to appear that she may not have been properly authorized to practice law anywhere, or, if she was, she had to be using her Harvard office as a regular law office, meaning that she was practicing Massachusetts law. Without a license.

Here is what Eno discovered:

1.  Warren says she has been a continuous member of the Texas bar,which is technically true but misleading. After following her constantly changing spin while explaining her undocumented status as an affirmative action beneficiary, I believe misleading us is her intent. Yes, she has been a member of the Texas bar during her whole career, but during most of that period she was not allowed to practice Texas law, which was the topic under discussion when Warren cited her membership. Kim Davey the Public Information Officer for the State Bar of Texas told Eno that Warren has been on inactive status in Texas since June 1, 1992. Inactive status means a lawyer is not authorized to practice law. Warren says that she only stopped practicing law (while living and working  in Massachusetts) in 2010, which means that she could not rely on her Texas license while she was at Harvard.

2. Thus it must have been her New Jersey law license that made Warren eligible to appear in Federal Court. But there’s a problem there, too. New Jersey rules hold that a lawyer can only be a licensed attorney in good standing in New Jersey if that lawyer maintains a bona fide office for the practice of law. The office can be in any state, but it must qualify as a law office, or New Jersey’s license to practice law is no longer valid.

This means that Warren is mired in a Catch 22. If, as her defenders and Warren have maintained, she was not engaged in the practice of law because her Harvard office did not constitute  “a systematic and continuous presence in Massachusetts for the practice of law” (because Warren was just a typical Harvard law professor who now and then helped write a few briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court and out-of-state federal courts), then she could not meet New Jersey’s licensing requirements, and was practicing law without any valid law license in any state once she went on inactive status in Texas. If, in the alternative, her Harvard office was a bona fide office for the practice of law, rather than a place where she just “dabbled,” then she was practicing in Massachusetts without a Massachusetts license. Continue reading →

Just Stop It—You’re Embarrassing Yourselves

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh yeah? Well this guy is a ROMNEY supporter!

As evidence grows that the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention may have been practicing law in Massachusetts—the state she seeks to represent in the U.S. Senate—without proper legal authorization, the description of the matter in the mainstream media, to the extent that it is mentioned at all, is that “the conservative blogosphere” is making the accusation. This ritual drives me to distraction, as readers of Ethics Alarms know. But if conservatives want to be given more respect when they uncover a legitimate story that the biased media will try to ignore or bury, they have to stop indulging themselves in utter garbage like this. Continue reading →

More Revelations Regarding Elizabeth Warren’s Alleged Unauthorized Practice of Law, and Why This Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Prof Jacobson, on his blog Legal Insurrection, is in line for an Ethics Hero award with his tenacity regarding Elizabeth Warren’s dubious qualifications to engage in the practice of law in  Massachusetts. The overwhelming reaction by his colleagues in legal academia, and mine in the legal ethics community, has been to airily dismiss his arguments as trivial, far-fetched and thinly disguised political warfare, since Jacobson is an unapologetic conservative blogger (and a distinguished one.) Meanwhile, the mainstream media has, I think it is fair to say, completely ignored the story.

Part of this is undoubtedly because of the ignorance of most journalists regarding the importance of the legal ethics rules in question. Part of it is probably due to the accurate assessment by editors and TV news producers that the average American’s brain would switch off right around the time the story mentions Massachusetts Rule of Professional Conduct Rule 5.5 Subsection (c), and will start wondering about how Blair from “The Facts of Life” is going to do on “Survivor.” And part of it, infuriatingly, is because most journalists are willing to forgo the ethical duties of their profession in order  to ensure that a Democrat wins back Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, and character be damned.

The rude brush off Prof. Jacobson is getting in this wagon-circling exercise is wrong in every way, and does injustice to every person and institution involved, including the Massachusetts legal establishment, the legal profession, ethical lawyers (which, believe it or not, the vast majority of them are), Senator Brown, the U.S. Senate, Massachusetts voters, and the American public. Bar associations across the country regularly punish ordinary lawyers who practice law without proper authorization, and there is a reason: a lawyer who won’t or can’t obey the most basic requirement of the profession—be sure you are practicing law legally—should not be trusted to handle the important transactions and controversies of their clients’ lives. Continue reading →

Indians, Pirates, Greeks, Intellectual Property, and Political Correctness

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The always understated Robert Newton as Long John Silver. You owe his estate a quarter every time you say “Arg!”

Here I am banging my forehead with the palm of my hand for not realizing that all of the rhetoric flying around about how horrible it is that people in the U.S. can get away with denigrating religions would spark yet another round of political correctness applied to team names and mascots. Perhaps this was inevitable when a vestige of an earlier controversy along these lines invaded the Elizabeth Warren-Sen. Scott Brown race: some of Brown’s staff were seen doing the old Atlanta Braves “tomahawk chop” to mock Professor Warren’s beneficial delusion that she is a bona fide Native American. The political correctness police were all over this one, though the logic, as in a lot of political correctness, was strained: doing a famous fake Indian gesture to mock a fake Indian political candidate is an insult to…real American Indians? Even after the real Cherokees have announced that Warren’s pretensions of affirmative-action worthy Native American status is offensive to them? I’m afraid  those who are empowered by being offended are just too creative for me—I don’t get it.

Nor do I get an earnest essay by  Paul Lukas on the ESPN website, titled “Time to Re-think Native American Imagery.” I am on record as believing that the assault on Native American symbols and imagery for school and team names is just more cynical power-mongering by convenient victims, with the exception of the Washington Redskins, the one team with an undeniably racist name that ought to offend everybody. Still, it is obvious that the political correctness thugs will keep chipping away, counting on their persistence and the eventual bureaucratic shrug (“Oh, what the hell—it’s only a name. Let’s just give them what they want!”) to give them a victory–whereupon they will find something else to be offended about.  Continue reading →

The Anti-Smoking Zealots Go To A Show

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

…and it really looks cool in the stage lights!

Once again I am embroiled in a battle with bullies, in this case bullies whose motivation I support, but whose application, attitudes and methods I both oppose and despise. The bullies are the anti-smoking zealots. I am very happy with the culture’s success in discouraging smoking, and most of the government’s efforts to make smoking expensive and difficult, though I would support the U.S. being straightforward and just banning tobacco products. The bullies, however, buy tickets to the theater company that employs me as its artistic director, and that theater produces only written or about the 20th Century, especially the middle of it, when people smoked a lot. This often requires some smoking on stage, at the discretion of the director and the requirements of the plot. Whenever this happens, I catch hell. And I give it right back. Continue reading →

Airport Ethics: And This Is How Cheating Becomes Respectable

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The owners of these bags are suckers.

Traveling from Cleveland to Washington. D.C., today, I noted that the ridiculous airport baggage checking policies have borne predictable fruit. Easily 50% of the fliers on my plane cheated, sneaking their bags through security to avoid the luggage charge.

And it is cheating.

The airline charges $25 for each bag checked. The airport screeners don’t know or care who is on what flight, so it is easy to get bags through security that are too large to fit in the overhead compartments of some or all flights. Once you get them through security (slowing down the line for everyone else: the line in Cleveland went so slowly that I though I was in a Candid Camera stunt. Six travelers celebrated birthdays, two retired, and one girl went through puberty while we waited. And I had to shave repeatedly), the attendant at the gate will tell you that your bag won’t fit, and gives you a tag. You tag the bag, and leave it on the jetway. Then it is picked up and put on the flight. After you land, the bag is delivered to the jetway, meaning that the cheaters also get their bags without waiting for the carousel, or having to worry about them getting lost. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Major League Baseball

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

MLB Wild Card play-off, 2020

I dislike baseball’s play-offs, especially the fact that a team that finished second over a 162-game season can still win the World Series and be called a champion. I really dislike the addition of a second “wild card” team to the post-season formula this year, which theoretically means that a team can finish third and end up as a champion. Yes, I know this is the way it has been for decades in football, basketball and hockey, but they are lesser sports, after all.

Baseball’s rules for the new one-game play-off between the wild-card teams, however, marks a new low in baseball’s integrity. Since it the single game is a separate play-off round, the suits who run the game have decided that managers can devise a unique 25 player roster for that game alone, and reconstitute the team if it goes on to the next round, a three-out-of-five series. The practical effect of this rule is that two teams will face each other not only bearing insufficient resemblance to the teams that actually earned the play-off slot, but will also play with a roster that would be disastrous over the course of  a season. Continue reading →

Policies Don’t Fix Unethical Professors

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

“Here is your assignment, class: Vote for who I tell you to.”

I saw this story and decided it was too obvious to write about. A community college math professor distributes to her class a pledge to vote for Obama and the Democratic slate, and demands that the students sign it—come on! Is anyone going to defend that as ethical? Then a reader sent me several links to the item (thanks, Michael), and after reading them, I was moved to reconsider.

The professor, Sharon Sweet, was put on unpaid leave pending an investigation; I can’t fault Brevard Community College (in Florida) for not firing her yet. What troubles me is the college’s statements that her conduct is just a breach of policy. BCC Spokesman John Glisch told the press that “The college takes this policy [prohibiting employees from soliciting support for a political candidate during working hours or on college property] extremely seriously. It is very important that all of our faculty and staff act in that manner at work and while they’re on campus.” So college provosts are reminding employees about the policy.

Let’s be clear. Associate Professor Sweet’s conduct was an abuse of power and position, an insult to the autonomy of the students and an attempt to take away their rights as citizens, disrespectful to them and the values of the nation, and an attempt to circumvent election laws and to subvert democracy. It was also, quite possibly, illegal. If a college needs to have a policy to stop teachers from behaving like that, it is hiring the wrong kinds of teachers—individuals whose ethics are those of totalitarian states, and whose respect for individual rights are nil. This was an ethical breach of major proportions, not a policy misunderstanding. No teacher should require a policy to tell her that this conduct is indefensible and wrong. Continue reading →