“Oklahoma!”

Judge Norman’s Dilemma Becomes The ALCU’s Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Cruel and unusual punishment? Guess again…

You’re a judge. You have power, in your sentencing, to make various miscreants suffer all sorts of creative punishments, as long as they fall well short of the rack and wheel. For example, a judge in Cleveland recently sentenced a woman (who had driven her car up the side-walk to get around a stopped school bus carrying special-needs children) to carry a sign proclaiming herself an idiot. You are faced with a troubled young man who appears to have received almost no instruction, in his 17 years, in the particulars of right and wrong. You see no productive purpose in locking him up and throwing away the key, for what he needs is a transfusion of ethics. What do you do?

In the throes of this very dilemma, Oklahoma district judge Mike Norman was sentencing Tyler Alred  for DUI manslaughter. Alred was driving his Chevrolet pickup drunk in  2011 when he hit a tree, ending the life of his passenger and friend, 16-year old John Dum. The judge gave Tyler a deferred prison sentence provided that he attend church every Sunday for the next ten years, as well as graduate from high school and welding school. Both Alred’s attorney and the victim’s family agreed to the terms of the sentence. Continue reading →

The Case of the Mildly Profane Valedictorian

/ Jack Marshall / 70 Comments

Time to apologize, Kaitlin. What the hell.

Kaitlin Nootbaar graduated from Prague (Oklahoma)High School in May and was named valedictorian, for her grades were exemplary. As is the policy, she submitted her planned graduation day speech to the school administration. It contained this passage, apparently a reference to the “Twilight” films:

‘When she first started school she wanted to be a nurse, then a veterinarian and now that she was getting closer to graduation, people would ask her, what do you want to do and she said how the heck do I know? I’ve changed my mind so many times.’”

In the excitement of the moment (she says) Kaitlin said “hell” instead of “heck.”

To her shock, the school’s principal informed her that it would withhold her diploma until she formally apologized. Her father is backing his daughter completely, and argues that this is illegal, and infringes on Kaitlin’s right to free speech.

I almost made this an Ethics Quiz, with a multiple choice answer to the question, “Who is in the wrong?”  The options:

a) Kaitlin

b) Her father

c) The school

d) All of the above

e) None of the above Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Administrators at Mustang (Oklahoma) Mid-High School

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"No whistles allowed in class, kid. You're suspended!"

In Mustang, Oklahoma, a ninth-grader used his cell phone to snap a photo of  his substitute teacher who was sleeping on the job, in class. Guess what happened?

The student was suspended for violating a school policy prohibiting the use of electronic communication devices during school hours.

This combines the irresponsible unfairness of “no-tolerance” policies with old-fashioned retaliation against whistle-blowers.  The student did the only thing he could do to record a breach of duty by the snoozing teacher, who was cheating students out of their education, cheating the school out of work it had contracted for, and cheating Mustang tax-payers out of their hard-earned cash. Using a cell phone for this purpose was not only ethical but essential to solving the problem. In a business, an employee who used a camera to record on-the-job misfeasance or malfeasance would be protected from adverse job action no matter what policies he broke, because he would be a whistle-blower. The 9th grader was also a whistle-blower. An ethical and responsible school would have thanked him, and held him up as a good citizen of the school.

What does that make a school, then, that uses a strict interpretation of a policy to justify retaliation against the student, and by so doing sends a clear message to other students that the administrators and educators will protect their own, even when they are in the wrong?

It makes that school corrupt and corrupting. It means that the school chooses to teach students the lesson that one should look the other way when wrong-doing occurs, rather than take remedial action.

Just who does Mustang Mid-High School think it is?

Penn State?

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Week: Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I know, I know. Soylent Green isn't the same thing, because embryos aren't people.

This need not take very long.. Ethics Alarms hasn’t honored an incompetent public official for a while, and Oklahoma freshman Sen. Ralph Shortey (R) has pretty much begged for this. You see, Sen. Shortey, citing his own Internet research [oh-oh...], believes that there is a looming threat of food companies using ground-up aborted fetuses in their products, and thus has proposed a bill that decrees that…

“…No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.“

Even though absolutely nobody else knows of any hint or rumor that Embryo Helper or anything similar is poised to hit the shelves, Sen. Shortey says that he introduced the bill as a warning to companies who might otherwise consider putting boxes of Fetus Frosted Flakes on Oklahoma breakfast tables, and to raise “public awareness.”

Let’s hope Shortey is successful, at least at raising public awareness that the man is an idiot, and can no more be trusted to determine public policy than my dog should be playing bassoon in the New York Philharmonic. Really…where do the political parties do their recruitment, anyway? How can they even locate people this unhinged from reality and their responsibilities? America is in need of innovative, well-executed measures to pull itself out of an epic funk, with crises in all directions, from the budget, to the infrastructure, to employment and housing, to education, immigration and the environment, and this maroon’s top priority is battling cannibalism?

Way to pick ’em, Republicans.

Now THIS Is Professional Misconduct!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

 

"Ed, you have to stop blaming yourself...you did nothing wrong!"

Dr. Thomas Wilson is accused of breaching professional ethical standards by having sexual relations with a patient while the doctor was still a student in Oklahoma. Normally a student’s misconduct would not result in sanctions almost two years later, after graduation and certification, but, you see, Wilson is a veterinarian, and his patient at the time of their illicit relationship was a horse.

The good doctor, who now practices at an animal hospital in Pennsylvania, is charged in Oklahoma with a “crime against nature,” but the ethical aspects of what he did go far beyond that. It is a breach of the trust with a patient incapable of  informed consent.  It is an abuse of power. It is animal cruelty. It is really, really, icky.

Are there such things as registered animal-sex offenders? I certainly hope so. Dr. Wilson should not be allowed within 100 yards of a race track, a rodeo, a farm, the Central Park carriages, or the set of AMC’s “Hell on Wheels.” The idea that he will be able to just pay a fine, go to some therapy sessions, and then blithely return to his equine practice without having to tell Mr. Ed’s owner that be has a record of horse-rape is unthinkable. Please tell me, Pennsylvania, that some kind of law protects your horses against sexual predators in sheep’s clothing?

[Thanks, I think, to Drew Curtis’s Fark for the link]

Stacy Crim, Ethics Hero…and the Hardest Choice

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Last week in Oklahoma, Ray Phillips fulfilled a promise to his sister Stacy, taking home from the hospital 5-pound Dottie Phillips, born prematurely in September, to become the newest member of his family.  Stacy died last month of brain cancer, just three days after holding her infant daughter for the first and only time. Dottie was able to come into the world only because Stacy, 41, had made the choice to reject chemotherapy for her rapidly spreading cancer that was diagnosed after she learned that she was pregnant.

When life places one of us in a “Sophie’s Choice” dilemma like Stacy’s, no one has standing to question or challenge whether the ultimate choice is “right.” There is no right choice. Stacy was faced with deciding whether to sacrifice the unborn child she had never met, a child whom many in America choose to regard as a neither a life or a being with any individual rights, but rather only as an ephemeral potentiality made of cells, similar to a pay-off at the races or a stock dividend. Even those who take the opposite view, that Dottie was a human life even at the earliest stages of her development in the womb, would never assert that a mother would be wrong to choose life-saving cancer treatments for herself at the risk of the unborn child. In such a case the right to choose is nearly unanimously accepted, and it is the hardest choice of all. Continue reading →

The Attack of the Grievance Bullies Continues…on “Napoleon Dynamite”???

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

So...I guess "Tropic Thunder" is out of the question, right?

A bulletin from the Austin (Texas) Parks Foundation:

“The Austin Parks Foundation is canceling tonight’s (Wed, 5/25) showing of Napoleon Dynamite at Republic Square. A new movie will be shown next month. A number of people contacted us objecting to a word used by actors in the movie. We didn’t recall that this word was used and we did not mean to offend anyone. Our apologies for this as well as for the last minute cancellation.”

The PG movie, you see, about a maladroit teen, upset advocates and defenders of the mentally challenged, or whatever code words are deemed politically correct these days–I haven’t checked my “Offense-O-Meter” in the last couple days—because one of the characters uses the word “retarded” exactly once…not to describe someone who is actually laboring with a disability, mind you, but to insult his friend, as teenagers are wont to due, and as they were especially wont to do in the Eighties, when “retarded” was used the way my generation used “spaz.” In other words, there was no justification whatsoever for either the complaint or the movie’s cancellation. Continue reading →