bad precedents

The Prospective Pardons Are Legal But Unethical and Dangerous [Updated Twice]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

When Ethics Alarms decided what had been a close competition between Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden for “Worst President Ever,” I honestly thought all of the evidence was in. There were only eight days to go, after all; it had finally been made sufficiently clear that our so-called President was on his way to becoming a zucchini, and worse, had been transitioning for years under the protection of an Axis cover-up. But then came Biden’s endorsement of censorship and the most unethical exit speech in U.S. Presidential history, followed by Biden’s embarrassing announcement that he was ruling the 28th Amendment ratified when it was not. Today, I woke up to the news that Biden had issued prospective pardons to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who betrayed his country with unauthorized contact with China; Dr. Fauci, the perjuring, lying, Deep State hack who was significantly responsible for the disastrous response to the Wuhan virus, Trump Deranged former Representative Liz Cheney and all the other members of the Pelosi-rigged House committee that dragged out and manipulated a partisan investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.

The close call now is whether this last official act by Biden is the worst of the batch. It may well be.

To chase the metaphorical elephant out of the room, prospective pardons are legal, constitutional, and probably irreversible. Presidents have issued general pardons applying to groups of people involving many offenses yet to be proven, and many times. There have been at least thirty amnesties before puppet Joe entered the White House: Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson issued them during and after the Civil War to benefit Confederates, and Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for Vietnam war draft dodgers. My favorite was President Madison’s 1815 pardon of pirate Jean Lafitte and his crew, who joined Andy Jackson’s American forces at the Battle of New Orleans. Madison’s grateful proclamation covered all who assisted in the defense of Louisiana in the battle (that occurred after the War of 1812 had ended), granting “a full and free pardon of all offenses committed in violation of any act or acts of the Congress of the said United States touching the revenue, trade, and navigation thereof or touching the intercourse and commerce of the United States with foreign nations at any time before the 8th day of January, in the present year 1815, by any person or persons whomsoever being inhabitants of New Orleans and adjacent country, or being inhabitants of the said island of Barrataria and the places adjacent . . .”

The fact that this vague and general sweeping Presidential pardon was issued by James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, makes it about as irrefutable a precedent as one could ask for. And thus the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the pardon power “extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency or after conviction and judgment.”

Nonetheless, just because one can do something (or get away with it) doesn’t mean it is ethical, prudent, responsible or right. Biden’s pardons for alleged crimes never investigated or proven to individuals holding his favor stretches the existing precedents to the breaking point, or perhaps gagging point is a more apt description. After all, Jean Lafitte was a pirate; the Confederate soldiers fought against their country, and the draft-dodgers were, you know, draft dodgers. Even Richard Nixon, pardoned by President Ford in what may be the nearest thing to a precedent for Biden’s pardons today, was a President of the United States whose potential indictable crimes had only been uncovered in the course of a House impeachment inquiry. At that point, the precedent could have been limited by those not insignificant details. Then came Biden’s Once and Future pardon of his black sheep son for crimes he had been convicted of committing and anything else he might have done yet undiscovered, just in case darling Hunter has been a serial killer when he wasn’t high. Today’s pardons take us to the end of the slippery slope.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Ferguson Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

News Item:

The parents of black teenager Michael Brown and the city of Ferguson, Missouri, have settled a lawsuit over his fatal shooting by a white city police officer in 2014, according to a court document filed on Monday. …Terms of the wrongful death settlement between Ferguson and Brown’s parents, Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, were not disclosed. U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber approved the settlement and ordered it sealed.

“The gross settlement amount is fair and reasonable compensation for this wrongful death claim and is in the best interests of each plaintiff,” Webber wrote. Both James Knowles, the mayor of the blue-collar, largely black St. Louis suburb, and Anthony Gray, the lead attorney for Brown’s parents, declined to comment.

Wait, what?

A thorough investigation found Officer Wilson guilty of no crime, nor did the shooting appear to be the result of officer malfeasance or negligence. Brown’s parents, Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, meanwhile, took extraordinary measures to stir up racial hatred and anti-police sentiment, not just locally but nationally, sparking deadly riots in Ferguson and elsewhere, and leading to attacks on police. They even made a human rights complaint to the United Nations, based substantially on a lie (“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”) concocted by their son’s friend and credulously reported as fact by the news media. By what theory are Brown’s parents deserving of damages from Ferguson? By agreeing to this settlement, is not Ferguson setting the precedent that any time a black suspect is shot by a white police officer, it is a wrongful death mandating damages?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was this settlement, whatever the amount, ethical?

I’ll launch the debate by saying that the city probably had no choice but to settle, as the sooner this whole catastrophe can get in the rear view mirror the better off the city will be. In the narrow sense, then, the settlement was in the city’s best interest and the responsible course.

Long term, however, I see nothing but bad results flowing from this result. If Wilson was not wrong, then Brown was at fault. If Brown was at fault, his family should not benefit. If Ferguson paid out a significant amount when its police officer behaved reasonably, then Ferguson just set a precedent that Black Lives Matter could have authored in its dreams.

If a black victim is shot by the police, it is  racism and a wrongful death per se, whatever the facts are.

In Kansas, A High School Ethics Train Wreck: An Unqualified Principal, Unethical Students, And A False And Dangerous Lesson About Consequentialism

/ Jack Marshall / 106 Comments

Why are these students smiling sweetly? Because they sent the message to their teachers to be wary; after all, there’s a lot of dirt on the internet…

Ugh.

Seemingly every one is cheering the Pittsburg High School (Kansas) students on the school paper who investigated their newly hired principal, found her credentials to be dubious, and forced her to resigned from her $93,000-a-year job. You can read the story here and here.

For the purposes of Ethics Alarms, I’m not interested in the principal at all. What matters here is that journalists, teachers, TV talking heads and everyone else commenting on the story are proving themselves ignorant of basic ethical principles, like the fact that conduct that happens to result in something desirable doesn’t make the conduct appropriate if it wasn’t ethical at the outset, aka “consequentialism leads to bad lessons and bad ethics,” and “the ends justifies the means.”

From the article:

“Pittsburg journalism adviser Emily Smith said she is “very proud” of her students. “They were not out to get anyone to resign or to get anyone fired. They worked very hard to uncover the truth.”

Emily Smith is too incompetent and ethically confused to advise aspiring student journalists or any other students. The students “wanted be assured that she was qualified and had the proper credentials,” according to the student editor of the paper. That’s not their job, their duty, or their business. They aren’t journalists; they are students learning about journalism. Determining if the new principal was qualified was entirely the responsibility of the the Pittsburg Board of Education, which botched its job and approved hiring the principal at its meeting March 6. That the students did the due diligence the Board failed to do is being used as cover by the Board: Everything worked out because of these great students, who we have educated so well!

Wrong. Unbelievably wrong. Dangerously wrong.

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

Dog Custody Ethics From The Vermont Supreme Court

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It's a dog's life, whatever THAT means...

It’s a dog’s life, whatever THAT means…

Pet dogs are more than property and less than citizens. When they become surrogate children, as they often do, the legal battles over which member of splitting couples will have custody can become as furious and emotional as anything in “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Now the Vermont Supreme Court has approved a a new approach to these cases, deciding one on the basis of “the best interests of the dog.” Here is the relevant portion of the decision, in the case of Hamet v. Baker: Continue reading →

The Teacher’s Pilgrimage

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

KHAN!!!!!

In August 2008, nine months after starting her job as a middle school math teacher in Berkeley, Ill., Safoorah Khan asked her school to give her three weeks off in December for a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Though a Muslim is supposed to make the pilgrimage, called a hajj, once in a lifetime and Khan was under 30, she insisted that this was the time for her to go, and believed that the school’s refusal—it argued that having to replace her for that length of time in the middle of the school year was unfair to the students and a burden on the school’s budget—was discriminatory. She quit, made her pilgrimage, and thus infused with the wisdom of Allah is suing the pants off of her former employers. Her lawsuit alleges that by refusing to make a “reasonable accommodation” to her request, it was discriminating against her on the basis of her religion.

Meanwhile, Eric Holder’s Justice Department is joining the case on her side. Continue reading →