Durham

Two From The Ethics Alarms “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files…Part II: The Bad Cop Catch-22

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In 1995, Darryl Howard [above] was wrongfully convicted of murder and imprisoned for more than two decades, one of many egregious miscarriages of justice during that period in Durham, North Carolina. Mike NiFong, the infamous prosecutor who pursued the Duke Lacrosse case, prosecuted him, and a Durham detective named Darrell Dowdy fabricated evidence while doing a negligent investigation. The Innocence Project helped free Howard; in 2016, the convictions were vacated and the DA who succeeded NiFong dismissed the charges. In April 2021, Gov. Roy Cooper officially pardoned Howard, who sued the city and Dowdy, and in December, a federal jury found former Detective  Dowdy had indeed framed him. A jury awarded Howard $6 million.

Durham, however, is refusing to pay and wants Howard to pay the legal fees of of two city employees who were eventually dismissed from the suit.

“I proved my innocence. I went through every court. Every judge says what this was, even the governor,” Howard told the Raleigh News & Observer. “Now I have to fight again.” Durham’s employees robbed Howard of the prime years of his life, but the city has tried every legal tactic to avoid addressing the injustice it was responsible for inflicting on him. One of its arguments is that since Howard had a record of various crimes and convictions before he was wrongly sent to prison for murder, it shouldn’t have to compensate him as if he were a model citizen.

Head explosion time. That’s one of the most unethical and illogical arguments I’ve ever heard a government make. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Durham District Attorney Roger Echols

/ Jack Marshall / 98 Comments

This is how a society erodes respect for the rule of law. It is a good way to pander to political correctness and social justice warrior jerks, though.

At the height of the mad fervor to tear down Confederate hero memorials and statues over the summer,  Takiyah Thompson, 22, Dante Strobino, 35, Ngoc Loan Tran, 24, and Peter Gilbert, 39. pulled down a century-old statue of a generic Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina. This was done in front in front of news cameras and during the day.

Thompson  is a student at North Carolina Central University, a black institution.  The three men belong to the Workers World Party, which  organized a Durham protest to piggy-back onto the Charlottesville, Virginia protests around the removal of a Statue of general Lee.

Notably, police spotted Tran at the court hearing for Thompson when a deputy asked him to help identify two people . Tran refused and he was arrested.

Tran explained the justification for the vandalism thusly:  “Monday night hundreds of people gathered in front of the statue, and it was the will of everyone there that that statue come down knowing that in the state of North Carolina there is no legal route for removing Confederate statues.”

Of course there is a legal route for removing statues. Continue reading →

The Giordano Decision, Sympathy and Malfunctioning Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sympathy and empathy are wonderful and admirable qualities, but they can mess up ethics alarms but good, causing them to ring out with gusto when perhaps they shouldn’t be set off at all.

This, I’m sorry to say, is what seems to be going on with the public and the media in the wake of a North Carolina judge denying Alaina Giordano primary custody of her two children,  in part because Giordano has Stage IV breast cancer, and in part because she is unemployed. Giordano is upset and nobody can blame her for that. She has also started a website exhorting readers to “Say NO! to CANCER discrimination!” There is a Facebook page (of course) rallying support for her, and it already has over 14,000 fans. An online petition to the governor called “Do Not Allow NC Judge To Take Alaina Giordano’s Children Just Because She Has Cancer ” has more than 75,000 signers.

Yet there is nothing inherently unethical, illogical or unfair about family law Judge Nancy E. Gordon awarding custody of 11-year-old Sofia and 5-year-old Bud to their father, who lives and works in Chicago, rather than to their mother, who lives in Durham, and has breast cancer that is most likely terminal. Continue reading →