crime

Porn: Finding Ethics in the Strangest Places

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

It should surprise nobody that Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” now out of jail for shooting her lover’s wife, married and in her mid-thirties, is outfitted with nifty breast implants and making money shooting porn films. At least her notoriety is being exploited in a manner that does not confer true celebrity status for her misconduct, unlike, for example, Michaele Salahi, who has been featured in glamour shots by the national media as a  direct result of her crashing a White House social event with her equally shameless husband. Amy was dismissive of her part-time porno career in a recent interview, and the woman she shot in the head, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, suggested in a follow-up interview that Fisher was ethically clueless (a not too far-fetched conclusion, all things considered), and that the fact that she made her living being photographed performing various sex acts despite being the parent of small children proved it.

This got me thinking about pornography..no, no, wait!—I mean about the ethics of pornography. Continue reading →

Desperate Lie of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

A Connecticut television station traffic reporter, Desiree Fontaine was caught by security personnel as she apparently tried to shoplift a Hawaiian shirt, a bottle of cologne, two pairs of earrings and a necklace from a Sears store. When she was apprehended, Fontaine explained that she was shoplifting as part of a freelance reporting project she was doing “on the side.” Presumably this will set up a First Amendment defense at her trial, with her lawyer arguing that shoplifting is protected by Freedom of the Press. Continue reading →

When a Crime Is More Unethical Than Illegal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“It’s just a dog folks!!! Why not go after people that brutally slaughter cows, chicken and pork. Oh wait, you eat those animals so that justifies killing them. This country’s priority is screwed up. He got what he deserved, fine, buy the couple another dog and perform community service. Now leave him alone.”

This was the reaction of a Washington Post reader to the widespread out rage over the cruel act of David M. Beers, a Marine Corps veteran who expressed his anger with a Maryland couple by taking their 4-pound pet Chihuahua and hurling her off a bridge to her death. A judge has sentenced him to four months in jail, and ordered him to pay a $1,000 fine, perform 300 hours of community service, and pay $318 restitution to Caisha and Timothy Wantz, who had just had a heated dispute with Beers before he took their pet.

The sentence is appropriately stiff, and yet inadequate too. Continue reading →

Gizmodo and Gawker: Guilty, Greedy, and Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Count Ethics Alarms with those who hope Gawker and its affiliated gadget site Gizmodo get as many books thrown at them as possible if the iPhone theft case gets to court.

As is always the case with Gawker, a completely ethics-free operation that has snickered about its participation in other outrages—such as its “Gawker Stalker” feature allowing people to alert the world to the exact location of any celebrity who is out, you know, trying to live—the sites management is crowing about doing wrong. “Yes, we’re proud practitioners of checkbook journalism,” tweeted Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. “Anything for the story!” Anything including fencing stolen goods, it seems. Nicely, the law often has a way of making unethical people wish they were more ethical, and this should be an example of that.

If you have somehow missed the story all the gadget geeks are tweeting about, Gawker released a scoop photo spread on Apple’s yet-to-be-released iPhone after an Apple engineer stupidly, carelessly and unethically left a prototype that he was entrusted with in a bar. It was found by someone who understood its value and who it belonged to, and who also had no more scruples than, well, Gawker. That meant that this California law applied… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Judge Darrell Russell

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Domestic abuse is a crime, a social malady and a sickness, one that frequently afflicts both the batterer and the victim. It is an especially infuriating crime to prosecute, because the couple drawn together in an abusive relationship often form bonds that even the threat of injury and death won’t loosen sufficiently to allow one party to testify against the other. Thus domestic abuse goes unpunished more often than not, and some prosecutors have decided that in the interest of society, these cases need to be prosecuted whether the beating victim likes it or not. They are correct. Violence and battery are crimes against the state, not just one individual. There is not much a prosecutor can do, however, when the judge is an Ethics Dunce, prepared to go the extra mile to free a loving couple for future mayhem. This brings us to the case of Baltimore Judge Darrell Russell,who recently charted new waters in judicial abuse of power, arrogance, incompetence, and irresponsibility. Continue reading →

The Duties of Citizenship, Ethics, and the Happy Rape Victim

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A few months ago,  Washingtonian Magazine printed the harrowing memoir of Amanda Pagliarini, a woman who as a teenager was raped by some friends of her boyfriend as he looked on and did nothing. Entitled “How Could He Just Stand There?” the article recounts how she first came to be involved with “Juan,” how the rape affected her life, and remarkably, how she came to talk with her ex-boyfriend about the tragedy and his role in it years later. One of his revelations was that the gang that raped her also had done the same to other girls.

Her article concludes with this: Continue reading →

The Seattle Beating Tape: “Just Following Orders”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I know the Nuremberg defense when I hear it, and this is the Nuremberg defense.

The release of a January security video from a Seattle transit station has triggered a public uproar, and no wonder: it shows a group of girls brutally beating a young woman, including kicks to her head, as three security guards stand by, watching, doing nothing. Well, not exactly nothing: they did call for help.

Gee, thanks, guys. Would you tell them to bring some aspirin, an ice pack and a stretcher while you’re at it?

Seattle officials say that the guards appear to have done their job properly. The training manual the guards follow says “Never become involved in enforcement actions.” Continue reading →

NEVER the Sinner?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The AP reports that there is a computer virus that causes one’s computer to independently visit child pornography sites and download material.  This has caused innocent people to be prosecuted, fired from their jobs, humiliated and ruined.

I would like the conduct of a person who would create and release such a virus explained to me. I would like the explainers to be those who will describe any bad act , no matter how heinous, as “one mistake,” and who resolutely maintain that engaging in wrongful conduct, no matter how destructive and cruel, doesn’t mean an individual is personally rotten to the core. “Hate the sin, never the sinner,” Clarence Darrow said. Darrow was one of the most persuasive and articulate people who ever lived. I wonder if he could have reconciled this with his convictions.

Now I’m going to check my computer.

And my faith in human nature.