New York

‘Don’t Be Shy, Just Say What You Really Think, Counsel!’

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

New York lawyer Rahul Dev Manchanda was disbarred in 2024 by the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court. The primary charge was that he persisted in using racist and anti-Semitic language in his disciplinary complaints against other lawyers and judges. “Words fail to capture the severity and extent” of the lawyer’s bigotry, the appeals court wrote in its order.

Among other offenses, Manchanda was found to have,

  • Filed documents with “unacceptably bigoted language” in state and federal courts and “a panoply” of agencies.

  • “Used intolerably vile and foul language and divulged privileged information” when responding to clients’ online complaints.

  • “Used racist, antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic statements while holding himself out as a well-trained and extremely experienced lawyer” in New York City.

  • “Repeatedly made meritless, frivolous and vexatious arguments well beyond the point at which he should have known better.” His “targets for such filings have grown to include this very disciplinary proceeding and collateral attacks that he has launched on it in state and federal courts.”

No weenie he, the lawyer is striking back. Manchanda has now sued the Attorney Grievance Committee for New York’s First Judicial Department, seeking $20 million in damages, which he claims he would have made in his practice over the next 20 years.

Yeeeeah.….

The suit alleges that the lawyer was disbarred because he is “a Republican, conservative, Christian values lawyer” who is Indian-American, and that the discipline he has been subjected to was “a simple, draconian, defamatory, slanderous, libelous death sentence, simply for exercising protected speech” against “activist extreme feminist and lesbian judges, racist law clerks, LGBTQ+ and biased court administrators, who routinely would lose his motions, sabotage his filings” and “arbitrarily and capriciously threaten him with contempt or arrest.” Manchanda has been persecuted, his suit claims, because his actions targeted agencies in which “the vast majority of New York City government employees” are “predominantly leftist, communist, Democrat, … of African American descent, with predominantly Jewish supervisors, as well as LGBTQ+ activists and extremists.”

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Ethics Observations on Harvey Weinstein’s Reprieve….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The New York Court of Appeals overturned the felony sex crimes conviction of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein yesterday. The 4-to-3 decision held that the trial judge deprived him of his right to a fair trial in 2020 when he allowed prosecutors to call witnesses who said Weinstein had sexually assaulted them despite the assaults having never been charged as crimes or proven to have occurred. Using allegations of past bad acts to prove guilt in a criminal trial is generally forbidden in New York and other U.S. jurisdictions with limited exceptions. Since Harvey is already serving a prison sentence for another set of crimes that will keep him locked away until he is almost 90, the decision is more symbolic than useful to Weinstein. But it still needed to be made.

Observations:

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More Trust Problems: Defunding’s Not the Answer, But What DO We Do About Our Untrustworthy Law Enforcement?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I guess the first step is admitting that it’s untrustworthy. [ I guarantee the 2022 level of trust represented above has declined.]

Out of Colorado comes the disturbing news that Yvonne “Missy” Woods, a Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA scientist, breached standard testing protocols, manipulated data in the DNA testing process and posted incomplete test results in a staggering 652 cases.The agency called it “an unprecedented breach of trust.” I’m not so sure about the “unprecedented” part, but it certainly doesn’t encourage the trust of the public, or perhaps more importantly, juries. The affected cases occurred between 2008 through 2023, but there may be more: an investigation is reviewing Missy’s work dating back to 1994. She worked for the lab for 29 years, but the CBIonly became aware of irregularities in her work last September. She was placed on administrative in early October and retired a month later. [Pointer: valkygrrl]

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Boomerang! The Unethical Law New York Passed To Get Donald Trump Just Nailed NYC’s Black, Democrat Mayor!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

If anything rates a Nelson, this does.

Back in May, I posted an Ethics Quiz asking if the Adult Survivors Act signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 to suck up to #MeToo voters was ethical. It provides a one-year window for people (aka women) to bring lawsuits over alleged sexual assaults occurring years or decades ago. Now a #MeToo law suit against New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been filed in the New York Supreme Court just before the law’s grace period expires today.

I wrote,

It was and is a blatantly political measure, pandering to the #MeToo crowd, which itself is deeply conflicted and corrupt. Now bad, bad men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and…surprise! Donald Trump, can be sued during a convenient one year window no matter how long ago their alleged sexual misconduct took place, or how blurry memories of the details may be. Never mind that the protection against unfair sexual assault and sexual harassment lawsuits based on accusations that only surface when the accuser calculates that there are forces at play in society (like “Believe all woman”) making a victory likely should be available to all citizens. Never mind that such late-hit lawsuits rely on emotion and politics as much as evidence…

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The Rotting American Public School System’s New Philosophy: “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Call Failure A Success.”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the ultimate expression of “The Great Stupid,” New York has gone to a bad Jerry Lewis movie (no, they aren’t all bad) for inspiration in revising its education policy. Faced with terrible math and reading scores for students—in some school, not one achieved what was considered minimum proficiency— a state school board lowered the standards so more students would “succees”. This was the measured response after, as one media source reported,

“A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight. Some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

No doubt? There are several reasons this crash is occurring. One is that the disastrous decision to close the schools in response to the health “experts” and news media-driven panic over the Wuhan virus seriously (and perhaps permanently) set back the intellectual development of America’s young. Before that, there was already evidence that U.S. IQs are declining, and not just in the White House. The politicized public school system now devotes crucial class hours to teaching black kids that they face a lifetime of permanent oppression in a racist nation, and making white kids believe that their skin shade signifies evil embedded in their DNA. Then there is the little problem of the education profession being riddled with incompetents from top to bottom, as well as today’s children spending more time on social media and video games than reading, while their parents have abdicated their traditional duties to stimulate their children’s intellectual life at home.

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It Really Is True: A Disturbing Number Of Elected Democrats Don’t Understand Or Support The First Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Do the voters who elect these opponents of democracy understand the implications of what they are doing in states like California, Massachusetts, Washington and, in this case, New York? I hope not. I sincerely hope the voters are just lazy and stupid, not genuinely in favor of curtailing individual rights.

Once again, a judge has had to step in and remind a government that “Congress shall make no law–– abridging the freedom of speech” as applied to the states through the 14th Amendment. New York’s dangerously woke governor Kathy Hochul happily signed into law last December “The Hateful Conduct Law,” entitled “Social media networks; hateful conduct prohibited.” She had personally called for the law, declaring that “[o]nline platforms should be held accountable for allowing hateful and dangerous content to spread on their platforms” because the alleged “lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability of these platforms allows hateful and extremist views to proliferate online.”

It is thought control Democrats and progressives like Hochul want, and prosecuting those who “spread” ideas that their mob calls hateful and dangerous is essential to that goal. The law, N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 394-ccc(1)(a) defines  “hateful conduct” as

“[T]he use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

Naturally, since the “beauty part” of such a law for aspiring totalitarians is that all-wise, ever-virtuous overseers like Hochul can decide any conduct or expression is “hateful” if they want to silence and punish the speaker. “Vilification, humiliation, or incitement” is undefined, but if whatever it is is directed toward an individual or group based on their “race”, “color”, “religion”, “ethnicity”, “national origin”, “disability”, “sex”, “sexual” orientation”, “gender identity” or “gender expression,” then it’s illegal. Continue reading →

It’s Called Sacrificing Individual Rights For “The Greater Good.” Jefferson Would Hate It, And So Should Any Ethical American

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Yet this is what progressives and Democrats increasingly argue for to solve problems.

Exhibit #1: David Brooks

It hard to believe that David Brooks was once considered to be a conservative. Spend enough time in the New York Times culture, apparently, at least if your character, principles and integrity are as weak as David’s seem to be, and you will emerge from your chrysalis as a new, collectivist, proto-totalitarian.

Here’s Brooks on PBS talking about what he’d like to see installed to address gun violence:

President Biden spoke about red flagging, that you would find somebody you think is potentially dangerous, and we would be able to — authorities would be able to go in and take guns away.

That would take a gigantic cultural shift in this country, a revamping of the way we think about privacy, a revamping of the way we think about the role government plays in protecting the common good. I think it’d be something I think would be good not only for — to head off shootings, but good to live in a society where we cared more intimately about each other.

And I would be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen. But, for many Americans, that would just be a massive cultural shift to regard community and regard our common good more frankly, in a European style. I think it would benefit our society in a whole range of areas, but it’s hard to see that kind of culture change to a society that’s been pretty individualistic for a long, long time.

Observe what “conservative” pundit Brooks is advocating here. The government decides someone is “dangerous” and can then take away Second Amendment rights. What would stop the government from taking other rights away that it might believe are “dangerous” in the hands of someone it fears? This is pre-crime. This is open-ended government control over individual liberty based on subjective standards. And David Brooks says he’d “be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen,” because he knows that he would probably not be a target of such government oppression. After all, he’s now on the “right’ side.

The United States, he says, is “pretty individualistic,” meaning too individualistic, by European standards. Yet the United States of America was created expressly to reject the limitations on individualism placed on its citizens by European cultures and governments.

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Ethics News Flash: There Is Admirable Ethics News From New York!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

New York is the East Coast dead ethics twin of California, one of the most damaging ethics corrupters among the states, and a constant anchor on any efforts to keep the culture from rotting. With one unethical mayor elected in New York City after another, the depressing Andrew Cuomo to Kathy Hochul hand-off in the State House, the corrupt and irresponsible state legislature, two habitually unethical U.S. Senators and the state’s determination to defy U.S. immigration law and the U.S. Constitution (I don’t have time to get into the rest, like the New York Times, Broadway and the Yankees), the entire Empire State has become on ongoing bad ethics pageant. Thus it is a shock, a relief, and a glimmer of hope that the it finally has generated a significant positive ethics development that should prompt the rest of the country to follow its lead.

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Wow! Extreme Ideology And Resistance To Stubborn Reality Leads To Astoundingly Unethical And Irresponsible Policies…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand how intelligent officials—and by “intelligent” here I only mean “smart enough to put their socks on before their shoes”—-can possibly convince themselves that ignoring common sense and the collected wisdom of centuries as well as the acquired knowledge of recent decades will have anything but disastrous results. But here we stand:

  • In June, the California Highway Patrol arrested two men after a search of their vehicle revealed a stash of cocaine and 150,000 fentanyl pills. Based on the amount of drugs involved, they were booked into jail with an initial bail amount of $1 million each. (Fentanyl kills people.) But a pre-trial risk assessment of the suspects resulted in the men being classified  “low risk,” so they were released on their own recognizance without either the local D.A. or law enforcement officials being consulted. The two men, 25-year-old Jose Zendejas and 19-year-old Benito Madrigal, faced up to 14 years in state prison. They were expected to show up back in court on July 21. Shockingly, they did not. Nobody knows where they are.Their release is part of the social justice movement to eliminate bail because it discriminates against poor people. It also helps with the over-incarceration problem, because it allows criminals to get away with their crimes and harm society again, while broadcasting the message to other would be criminals that they are in a low-risk, high rewards profession as long as they stay where fantasy-blinded progressives run things….like California.

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New York’s New Gun Law To Counter The SCOTUS Bruen Ruling Is Unconstitutional, The State’s Democrats Know It, And They Don’t Care

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Conclusion: this is not a political party (nor are is progressivism an Ideology) that supports or respects democracy or the Rule of Law.

In the process of passing a restrictive law that bans legally-licensed guns in “many public settings such as subways and buses, parks, hospitals, stadiums and day cares…[and] Times Square Guns as well as on private property “unless the property owner indicates that he or she expressly allows them,” New York legislators included this language in the law:

THE APPLICANT SHALL MEET IN PERSON WITH THE LICENSING OFFICER FOR AN INTERVIEW AND SHALL, IN ADDITION TO ANY OTHER INFORMATION OR FORMS REQUIRED BY THE LICENSE APPLICATION SUBMIT TO THE LICENSING OFFICER THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION: (I) NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION FOR THE APPLICANT’S CURRENT SPOUSE, OR DOMESTIC PARTNER, ANY OTHER ADULTS RESIDING IN THE APPLICANT’S HOME, INCLUDING ANY ADULT CHILDREN OF THE APPLICANT, AND WHETHER OR NOT THERE ARE MINORS RESIDING, FULL TIME OR PART TIME, IN THE APPLICANT’S HOME; (II) NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION OF NO LESS THAN FOUR CHARACTER REFERENCES WHO CAN ATTEST TO THE APPLICANT’S GOOD MORAL CHARACTER AND THAT SUCH APPLICANT HAS NOT ENGAGED IN ANY ACTS, OR MADE ANY STATEMENTS THAT SUGGEST THEY ARE LIKELY TO ENGAGE IN CONDUCT THAT WOULD RESULT IN HARM TO THEMSELVES OR OTHERS; (III) CERTIFICATION OF COMPLETION OF THE TRAINING REQUIRED IN SUBDIVISION NINETEEN OF THIS SECTION; (IV) A LIST OF FORMER AND CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS OF THE APPLICANT FROM THE PAST THREE YEARS TO CONFIRM THE INFORMATION REGARDING THE APPLICANTS CHARACTER AND CONDUCT AS REQUIRED IN SUBPARAGRAPH (II) OF THIS PARAGRAPH; AND (V) SUCH OTHER INFORMATION REQUIRED BY THE LICENSING OFFICER THAT IS REASONABLY NECESSARY AND RELATED TO THE REVIEW OF THE LICENSING APPLICATION.

What the hell is “good moral character”? Is any Constitutional right dependent on “good moral character”? The answer is no, because first, citizens have certain guaranteed rights regardless of their character, second, the right to bear arms is one of those rights, and third, opinions on what constitutes good moral character is subjective. For example, I think elected legislators in the United States who deliberately pass unconstitutional laws have terrible character. Could voting or freedom of speech be made contingent on a government agent’s judgment of a citizen’s character? No—it’s not even a valid question. No. Obviously no.

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