Missouri

Mark Clemishire And The One That Got Away

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Big Fish

Letting a fish you’ve caught swim off to be hooked another day doesn’t exactly place you in the altruism big leagues with Oscar Schindler,  but one takes one’s ethical opportunities as they arrive. For Mark Clemishire, a fly fisherman from Skiatook, Oklahoma, this qualifies as exemplary ethics, and attention should be paid.

It was about a month ago that  Clemishire was plying his craft in Lake Taneycomo, Missouri, and after an epic battle, caught a monster rainbow trout he immediately dubbed Troutzilla. Measured at 31 inches long with a girth of 22 inches, Troutzilla almost certainly weighed more than 20 pounds, which easily surpassed the existing record for a rainbow trout. To get credit for his achievement, a big deal for a serious fly fisherman, Clemishire’s trout had to comply with Missouri Department of Conservation rules that required the catch to be weighed on department certified scales. But instead of etching his own name in the record books, embracing immortailty and a place in the Fly Fishermen’s Hall of Fame, if there is such a thing, Mark had some photos taken of him posing with his Catch of the Day, and let Troutzilla go free. Continue reading →

A Ken White Sampler

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Obama maskFor those readers who are not familiar with Popehat’s Ken White, I offer this recent example of his deft ethics analysis and his perceptive and balanced commentary. I was going to write something that would have reached similar conclusions, but there is no point now. I can’t do better than this, and when I can do as well, it’s a good day.

Here is Ken’s commentary on the rodeo clown in the Obama mask.

I Would Have Fired Sympathetic, Well-Meaning, Grandmotherly Sharon Snyder, Too: The Perils Of Consequentialism

/ Jack Marshall / 132 Comments

Hear me out.

Why do I suspect that if this had been the clerk in question, we wouldn't be hearing about this story?

Why do I suspect that if this had been the clerk in question, we wouldn’t be hearing about this story?

The news media is indignant over the firing of Sharon Snyder, 70, a court worker who provided a copy of a successful motion for seeking post-conviction DNA testing that gained Robert Nelson a reversal of his wrongful 1984 rape conviction. He had been sentenced to more than 50 years in prison, and the belated DNA testing showed that he was innocent. Nevertheless, court officials in Jackson County, Missouri ruled that Nelson’s “angel” had improperly provided advice about a case, among other violations of court rules.

Snyder  was fired nine months before she was scheduled to retire, and there is little question that without her efforts, Nelson would still be in prison. In August 2009, Nelson filed a motion seeking DNA testing that had not been available at his trial 25 years earlier, but Jackson County Circuit Judge David Byrn denied the request. Two years later, Nelson asked the judge to reconsider, but again Byrn rejected the motion because Nelson’s self-drafted document was insufficient under the statute Nelson had cited.  After the second motion was rejected, Snyder contacted Nelson’s sister and gave her a copy of a successful motion, drafted by a lawyer, that resulted in the same judge granting another DNA testing request.  Nelson then used it as a template for a motion he filed Feb. 22, 2012, again seeking DNA testing.  Byrn sustained the motion, found Nelson to be indigent and appointed Laura O’Sullivan, legal director of the Midwest Innocence Project, to represent him.  Last month, the Kansas City Police Department’s crime lab concluded that DNA tests proved that Nelson was not the rapist in the crime he had been convicted of committing. He was freed on June 12, 2013

This is all good, and an example of justice finally, if belatedly, prevailing.

Snyder’s role, however, got her suspended without pay, and then fired on June 27. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Too Stupid To Be Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
Little Tommy flunked Ethics 101. Should we blame him?

Little Tommy flunked Ethics 101. Should we blame him?

An incident in Jefferson City Missouri nicely raises an issue I think about often.

Capital 8 Theaters in Jefferson City, Missouri sent actors dressed as gunmen, wearing assault gear and carrying what appeared to be semi-automatic weapons, into a screening of the film “Iron Man 3”  last weekend. Really. Apparently the similarity between this scenario and the deadly shooting last year in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater premiering another big budget movie about a superhero never occurred to the theater manager, because he is, you see, a moron. It sure occurred to the patrons, though, and one of them called in the police, saying that gunmen had entered the theater. SWAT teams were called. Luckily nobody was shot or had cardiac arrest, no thanks to the theater.

Interviewed by a local TV station, manager Bob Wilkins was asked if he had any regrets. “No, my job is to entertain people,” he said. Asked if he considered  how  his stunt might affect patrons who remembered the mass shooting in the theater in Aurora, Wilkins responded, “Absolutely. That’s my number-one priority every day. It’s the safety and security of our guests.”

Okay, this pretty much tells us what we need to know about old Bob, so here is your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz question:

May abject stupidity be a complete defense to the accusation that one is unethical? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Case of the Maybe Killer Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Tough one! Are you ready?

Convicted killer and lawyer too?

Convicted killer and lawyer too?

Richard Buchli, a Missouri lawyer who was convicted of beating his law partner to death, was getting a new trial after it was revealed that the prosecution had illegally withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. There was some strong evidence supporting his conviction, such as the fact that the partner’s blood was splattered on Buchli’s clothes in a manner consistent with a beating death. (Buchli argued that he got bloody trying to revive his partner.) The court, however, frustrated with the prosecution continuing to drag out discovery and failing to deliver all the evidence to Buchli’s legal team, threw out the conviction completely and barred all the evidence in the case, effectively making Buchli, who had been in prison since 2002, a free man.

Now Buchli, who was disbarred in 2005 (killing your law partner is considered unethical), wants his law license back. Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz Question:

Should he get it? Continue reading →

The Schizo Principal’s Facebook Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Principal Losos, a.k.a Suzy Harriston. Don’t ever call  her “Sooz”.

In Clayton, Missouri, the high school principal has resigned after being outed as a fake student on Facebook. Posing as Clayton High student Suzy Harriston, Principal Louise Losos amassed over 300 student friends from her school, until a former student pierced her false identity and urged everyone to de-friend it. Poor, fictional Suzy vanished, and shortly afterward so did Louise, who was placed on a leave of absence. Now she has resigned.

Can anyone think of a good reason why Losos should not have lost her job? In addition to being creepy, her posing as a student was a lie, and hardly proper conduct for the head of a school, a role model, and an ethical exemplar. If she were investigating a murder, or a series of unexplained thefts, or a suspected Al Qaeda cell working out of the Science Club, she might have some ammunition on her side, but the only use she seems to have put Suzy to was building student support for a friend of hers, a physical education teacher, whose job was in jeopardy.

There was one note in the Yahoo! report that complicates the analysis: Continue reading →