obstruction of justice

Meet the Grants!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Hmmm…I wonder who’ll play Jennifer in the Lifetime movie?

If this developing story from Seattle was a Lifetime Network movie, I would regard it as proof positive that LMN was running out of plausible plots. Since it appears to be real, I regard it as proof positive that life is running out of plausible plots.

Meet the Grants. They make fun couple David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell look like Mike and Carol Brady.  Described as a Seattle “power couple”, he’s a successful lawyer, and she’s city prosecutor. He’s also an accused serial rapist.

Dan Grant faces seven charges of raping Chinese women working as massage therapists, and another charge for first-degree burglary. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. The chances that there is sufficient evidence to charge a Seattle lawyer as a serial rapist and that the evidence is nonetheless erroneous are slim, as are the chances that the police would charge the husband of a prosecutor without an air-tight case. Still, the word alleged needs to be attached to all of this. This isn’t just alleged, however: a recently released search warrant shows that prosecutor Jennifer Grant moved her husband’s SUV from in front of the massage parlor where he allegedly raped one of the Chinese women to a location far away from both the parlor and the Grants’ home. Gee, thanks, honey! Now why would she do that? The Good Wife Prosecutor swears that she took no evidence from the SUV except a garage key card, but a search warrant affidavit indicates that police believed that the vehicle contained a knife, condom wrappers, phony police ID and DNA. Continue reading →

Fick Sighting in Prince George’s County

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Leslie Johnson, fick.

Ethics Alarms recently coined the useful term fick to describe the especially shameless individual who violates society’s ethical norms openly, publicly and flagrantly, without remorse or apology. It takes a certain kind of anti-social arrogance to be a true fick, with the gold standard established by Michigan lottery winner Leroy Fick, a millionaire who happily continues to collect food stamps because of a statutory loophole despite howls of indignation from his neighbors in one of the most fiscally-challenged states in the nation.  Other ficks who have come to light include Hugh Heffner despicable ex-fiance Crystal Harris, who plotted to humiliate him at the altar to launch a reality show. Of course, there is  longstanding Octo-fick Nadya Suleman, and celebrity fick Charlie Sheen.

Now lucky Prince George’s County in Maryland has a bona fide fick of its own.  Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Buzz Bissinger

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It took about an hour after the  Barry Bonds verdict for the first ethics-challenged national sports writer to write something outrageous about it. Not surprisingly, it was Buzz Bissinger, a the member in good standing of the Daily Beast’s stable of annoyingly hypocritical, biased or appallingly cynical writers, Bissinger belonging to the last category.

His post, which pronounced the Barry Bonds conviction “a travesty” in the title, contained one ethics howler after another, any of one of which would have justified an Ethics Dunce prize.

Here they are:

“It is true that the case of Barry Bonds does hit a new low, a new low in the waste of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, a new low in the witch hunt of a player who, because he was considered surly and arrogant and unlikable, is now having intimate details of his life revealed (such as testicle shrinkage), a new low in outrageous abuse of government power.” Continue reading →

The Bonds Verdict: Fair Enough

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The results of the Barry Bonds trial, which today concluded with the jury finding baseball’s all-time home run champion guilty of obstructing justice by misleading a grand jury investigating the distribution of illegal and banned steroid to professional athletes but unable to agree on the perjury charges, helps to balance the ethical scales. It should silence the shameless Bonds defenders who misused the “innocent until proven guilty” standard to maintain poor Bonds was being unfairly suspected of inflating his biceps, head, statistics and income through the marvels of chemistry, though it was blatant and obvious in dozens of ways. Now he has been proven guilty—not of everything, but for celebrity justice, in a trial where much of the most damaging evidence was withheld from the jury, enough—, so the claims of racism and unfair prosecution will ring even hollower now. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Nailing Barry Bonds

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Is Barry Bonds getting the Al Capone treatment? Should we care?

Baseball’s all-time home run king Barry Bonds is finally on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice relating to his 2003 testimony before a grand jury that he never knowingly used steroids. It looks like he may get convicted too, even though the one man who could harm him most, his trainer and childhood pal Greg Anderson, once again has refused to testify and is in jail for contempt of court. (Many—including me— believe that Anderson has a promise of a pay-off from Bonds.)

Essentially everyone who isn’t actively trying to protect Bonds, completely ignorant of the facts of his career, or mentally handicapped knows he was lying and knew it at the time of the grand jury hearings. Barry has been both lucky and relentlessly dishonest, however, seemingly happy to spend the millions he made while cheating and permanently damaging his sport, and pleased with himself for retiring in possession of baseball’s most prestigious home run records, the most homers in a single season, and the most homers in a career.  That Bonds achieved these, and several of his Most Valuable Player awards, while enhanced with the surreptitiously induced body chemistry of a Bulgarian weight-lifter in the 1972 Olympics doesn’t seem to faze him at all. Meanwhile, critics are dredging up the old rationalizations to defend Bonds, none of which apply to his current fix. Continue reading →

Leslie Johnson, the Implications of Guilt and the “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” Confusion.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In the context of American justice, “innocent until proven guilty” means that nobody is legally guilty of a crime until a court proceeding has ruled so after a fair trial. The term is nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights; it flows from the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, requiring that no one can lose his or her freedom or property without due process of law. What it does not mean is that a wrongdoer is literally innocent of a crime until a jury or judge has officially declared that he is. If he did something, he did it, and if we all know he did it, we don’t have to pretend he didn’t or that we don’t.

I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on television and get taken into custody on the spot, and still had to listen to broadcasters say he “allegedly shot Kennedy’s assassin” as if it was still just a theory. By this standard, John Wilkes Booth only “allegedly” shot Lincoln, since he was never tried. The fact that a theater full of people saw him do it, leap to the stage and run off derringer smoking, doesn’t mean a thing. He’s as pure as the driven snow, innocent forever. Continue reading →

LaBron, Steinbrenner, and Warped Sports Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Sports ennoble us through the  symbolic exploits of latter-day mythic heroes, who use their amazing skills and talents to exemplify courage, grace under adversity, loyalty, accountability, sacrifice, and, of course, sportsmanship.

Or so they say.

Sometimes it works out that way, but just as often an extraordinary athlete like LeBron James will choose to use his prominence to promote less attractive character traits, like greed, vanity, disloyalty, cruelty and boorishness. For some reason, the mega-millions LeBron was going to receive for fleeing Cleveland as an NBA free agent was not sufficient booty: the basketball star felt that “branding” required that he tease as many cities and franchises as possible, rub Cleveland’s loss in the faces of his previously worshipful fans in that city, and then announce his final choice of new employers in an ESPN TV special that embarrassed his sport and his species. James is not alone, of course; he has lots of company among college and professional athletes whose preening and selfishness make it impossible to use their names and “role model” in the same sentence.

But for the use of sport to warp ethical priorities, nothing quite matches the nauseating accolades being heaped on the late George Steinbrenner, whose ownership of  the New York Yankees was a decades-long advertisement for the principle that the end justifies the means, and as long as you win, nothing else really matters. Continue reading →

The Justice Department’s Voter Intimidation Cover-Up: The Blue Line Breaks

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Holder-Obama Justice Department’s efforts to impose racial bias on its enforcement of the voting rights laws are no longer in the shadows, protected by the “blue line” of liberal leaning news media. Finally, after a week of ignoring a story that should have been reported immediately, the media’s efforts to confine the accusations of former Justice Department Civil Rights attorney J. Christian Adams to conservative blogs and Fox began to crack. Today the New York Times and CNN reported the story, and will have a little easier time explaining away their tardiness as something other than naked political bias than the Washington Post, the major networks, and others.

But not much easier. Continue reading →

Ethics Outrage and Cover-Up: Racial Bias At the Justice Department

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The story told by former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams is shocking in many ways. It shows an abject refusal of Attorney General Holder’s D.O.J. to enforce the law equally with black and white. It shows sympathy within the Obama Administration for, of all, groups, the Black Panthers, a racist organization. It details perjury by high-ranking officials, and a hard breach of President Obama’s pledges to uphold the rule of law, embrace transparency, and to embody a post-racial philosophy. Finally, it shows the same kind of manipulation of law enforcement by ideological zealots that stained the Bush Department of Justice. Continue reading →

The Paterson Scandal: Another Governor Bites the Ethics Dust

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

For weeks, rumors have been swirling around New York Governor David Paterson, indicating that the New York Times was about to drop a scandal bombshell that would mortally wound his political career. The rumors themselves became a story, bringing some sympathy to Paterson as a political figure being smeared by whispers and innuendo. Paterson, who became governor when his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, disgraced himself and his office by patronizing exactly the kind of prostitution ring he made his reputation prosecuting, was already unpopular and hadn’t helped himself any by claiming his unpopularity was fueled by media racism.

The good news for Paterson: from this point on, he needn’t worry about racism being the cause of his low approval ratings.

The bad news: The New York Times did have a scandal to investigate, and it shows the governor to be almost as great a hypocrite as Spitzer, as well as an abuser of his power and position. Continue reading →