criminals

The Shame Of Inadequate Government Susidized Child Care

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

burglar family

What’s a single parent burglar to do?

In Arlington, Virginia, police stopped and arrested Nehemiah Guillermo Gonzalez, 30, fleeing the scene of a burglary he had just committed. Inside the Jeep , along with antique silverware and gold coins  stolen from the home was the criminal’s four-year-old child. After all, he couldn’t leave the little tyke alone while Dad plied his profession. You know how hard it is to find babysitters, and he had to rob someone to pay for child care, but couldn’t rob anyone without child care. So it had to be “Bring Your Kid to Work Day.”

Yes, I think better subsidized day care for criminals is essential. Think of the children! Sure, we can keep charging caring, desperate, single working parents like Nehemiah with child endangerment, or we can do something kind, compassionate and productive.

What are the odds that some legislator will actually make this argument?

_________________________

Spark and Pointer: Lianne Best

Facts: NBC

Graphic: Lilly and Bliss

 

Ethical Burglar Of The Year (Assuming Santa Doesn’t Qualify)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Now this is an ethics category you don’t see very often!

"Let's hope that I do not, while gathering my swag, encounter evidence of a crime that, unlike burglary and theft, my personal value system regards as repugnant, for then, as a responsible citizen burglar, I would be ethically obligated to report it to law enforcement officials, thus placing myself at greater risk of arrest..."

“Let’s hope that I do not, while taking valuables and property from the private residence I am about to break into, encounter evidence of a crime that, unlike burglary and theft, my personal value system regards as repugnant, for then, as a responsible citizen burglar, I would be ethically obligated to report it to law enforcement officials, thus placing myself at greater risk of arrest…”

In Spain, a burglar  broke into the home of a trainer for a kids soccer team, and discovered a collection of child pornography, including self-made recordings of the homeowner sexually abusing children as young as ten. The burglar placed an anonymous call to local police and said he left the evidence in a car, along with a note on which he wrote the apparent pedophile’s address. “I have had the misfortune to come into possession of these tapes and feel obliged to hand them over and let you do your job, so that you can lock this … up for life,”  the burglar told police in his message.

The trainer has been arrested and charged;  one of his victims, who is now 16, told authorities she had been abused since the time she was 10.

A few ethics observations on an intriguing case: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Ex-Con John Collins

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Charlie made a different kind of mistake, too!

“We’re people, we’re not monsters. We’ve just made a different type of mistake than someone else.”

— 34-year-old John Collins, who announced his support for a provision being pushed forward by the Seattle Office For Human Rights, which believes that convicted criminals should be made a protected class.

Collins sure made a different kind of mistake, all right. He served four years in prison for drugging and raping his estranged wife. Continue reading →

Julian Assange: Not a Hero, Not a Terrorist, Not a Criminal, Just an Asshole

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I know. Well, sometimes a vulgar word is the most accurate we have.

Our definition of journalism has yet to catch up with the cyber age, and freedom of speech does not distinguish among blogs, newspapers and dissidents. What ensures responsible use of First Amendment rights is ethics, not law. America allows journalists to act as information laundries, taking material that a private citizen was bound not to reveal by law, contract, or professional duty, and to re-define it to the world as what “the public has a right to know,” defined any way the particular journalist finds appealing.

Despite all the fulminating and condemnations by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich on the Sunday talk shows, the U.S. can’t make Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a terrorist just by calling him one, nor can it fairly declare him a criminal for accepting the product of the unethical and often illegal acts of leakers, and making it public, just like the New York Times has done on many occasions…not under current laws.  Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier who leaked many of the secret documents, is certainly a criminal. So was Daniel Ellsberg, who, to nobody’s surprise, is cheering Assange on and attacking his critics. . Assange, however, is not a criminal. He has not revealed any information that he accepted in trust while  promising not to reveal it. He is no more a criminal than the New York Times, if the New York Times was published in Hell. Continue reading →

Ethics and Freeing the Unjustly Convicted: A Utilitarian Controversy in Illinois

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess and his student reporters have been carrying out a heroic and aggressive project aimed at rescuing innocent residents of Illinois’s death row. It was Protess’s Medill Innocence Project that played a major role in influencing former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s decision to halt all executions. Now, however, the Innocence Project’s methods are now under attack by its own university and Cook County prosecutors, who say the students crossed legal and ethical lines while investigating a decades-old murder.

Prosecutors claim that some of Protess’s students used surreptitious taping in an investigation, secretly recording a suspect in violation of Illinois law. Continue reading →

Note to the EEOC: “Fairness” Must Not Require The Suspension of Common Sense

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In the  rich and annoying category of “Official Statements and Actions That Guarantee The Death Of Affirmative Action,” we have the recent warning by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that companies using criminal records to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws and be illegal because such a policy would have the effect of disproportionately disqualifying blacks and Hispanics. Continue reading →

What is the “Worst” Behavior? Don’t Ask Conservative Bloggers!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

John Hawkins of Right Wing News persuaded 43 conservative bloggers to send him their list of the twenty worst Americans in history. He then compiled a list of “The 25 Worst Americans” using their responses, with the rankings based on the number of blogger who listed an individual.

The list is disturbing, but not for the reasons you think.  What does it say about the priorities and values of conservative bloggers that the “worst American” among all the criminals, serial killers, scoundrels and sociopaths America has produced is, by this method of measurement...wait for it…

...Jimmy Carter? Continue reading →