Bloody Lawyers

Son Of Watergate Likely To Be Stillborn

Bloody Lawyers, Madness of King George, US politics
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The seventies are back and not just economically. Congressional subpoenas are about to start flying again, articles of impeachment are on the agenda and the federal courts have held there is no executive privilege and we may get a modern day Watergate as a result, with all the dirt dragged out into the light of 24hr multichannel coverage.

A girl can but hope…

Michael Dominguez, Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Defense, has already been threatened with contempt of congress after he revealed that he ordered Dr. Kaye Whitley,the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office not to comply with her own subpoena and testify about the continuing rapes of women soldiers by their supposed comrades.

Now the likes of Karl Rove and White House counsel Harriet Meiers may well be compelled by subpoena to testify about Bush malfeasance to Congress. Seeing the woman warped enough to have a crush on the idiot prince being forced to tell all will be entertaining, to say the least; as for seeing that pig Rove on the stand, squirming, well that’s just candy.

But wait – what’s this? Oh yeah, I forgot, goshdarn it.

The Bush administration can appeal, which of course they will, as what might come out otherwise would certainly land them all in jail for years, fifth amendment or no fifth amendment. Those are years they’d rather spend tying the courts up in knots, shredding documents, wiping hard drives and getting their friends in the media to revise history.By the time they get all the way to the Supreme Court there’ll be a new administration and much less appetite for raking up unpleasantness.

In any case once there I’m sure that that nice Mr. Scalia will ensure that any Son Of Watergate never sees the light of day.

I never get any fun.

The Age Of Entitlement

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Culture, Health, Parenting
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There has been much criticism this week of the dyslexic student at Plymouth’s Peninsula Medical School who’s sueing to have multiple choice exams removed from the curriculum in a teaching system which already allows extra support.

The BMA calls this learning disability ‘the gift of dyslexia’ and sees no reason why dyslexics should not qualify as doctors.

Speaking as a patient my view on dyslexic doctors is simple, clear and unequivocal – if it comes down a clash between the right of someone with a learning disability to follow their dream, and my right not to be killed as a result of their doing so, then I say sorry, choose another profession.

That is neither nice nor nasty, but simple self-preservation.

We are all different I have a degree of dyspraxia – I’m a bit clumsy – and synaesthesia, and I have depth perception problems. But my IQ (if you accept the validity of IQ in the first place) once tested in the top 3% of the nation.

I *choose* not to drive a car, although this causes me social problems and narrows my career choices, because I know I’d be a potential danger to the public. Similarly I decided not to be an engineer – not because I’m too thick, but because I have no aptitude for numbers. I might even be diagnosed as dysnumerate, were my middle class parents seeking to game the system in my favour. Certainly any railway, bridge or large building designed by me would be a danger to the public.

So too a person who has difficulty reading, writing and spelling (for whatever reason) has no aptitude to become a doctor and is a fool to think they do. A large component of the practice of medicine consists of clear and accurate observation, record keeping and prescription. There are minor spelling differences between hypo and hyper, for instance, yet the difference in meaning is vast and immediately life-threatening.

“0.1mg or 01mcg? Ooooh, not sure, let me squint a little…”

Doesn’t work, does it.

But the primary reason why this student is unqualified to be a doctor is not her dyslexia; it’s that she’s putting her own career ahead of her future patients’ interests. That’s not someone I’d want to treat me or anyone close to me.

If you’re bright enough to be interested in medicine as a career then you surely should also be bright enough to see the danger you might pose to a patient. How does the Hippocratic oath go? “First do no harm”? I can’t see how this student could take any such oath in good conscience. Or maybe she doesn’t have a good conscience; maybe she sees notions like ‘care for the patient first’ as boring old shibboleths which cannot be allowed to interfere with her own personal life choices.

This student and those supporting her are incredibly selfish – but then again, what can we expect from the flower of 3 generations of entitlement culture?

Just by way of hyperbolic illustration, here’s where making allowances gets you:

Doctor barred by state helps in U.S. executions

By Henry Weinstein
November 15, 2007 in print edition A-17

Note This article includes corrections to the original version.

A doctor who was barred from taking part in executions in Missouri because of concerns his dyslexia would interfere with his ability to administer lethal injections is helping the federal government carry out death sentences in Indiana, according to court documents.

The physician has been the target of more than 20 malpractice suits, was barred from practicing at two hospitals and was publicly reprimanded by a state agency for failing to disclose those suits to a hospital where he treated patients, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The newspaper identified the doctor as Alan R. Doerhoff of Jefferson City, Mo.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. of Kansas City, Mo., banned Doerhoff from participating “in any manner, at any level” in lethal injections in Missouri.

The judge said earlier he was “gravely concerned” that the doctor responsible for “mixing the drugs which will be responsible for humanely ending the life of condemned inmates, has a condition [dyslexia] which causes him confusion with regard to numbers.”

Federal officials, however, have made Doerhoff part of the execution team at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., according to court papers filed on behalf of several inmates there. All condemned federal prisoners are executed at that prison.

Among those executed there was Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh.

Ah well, if this student wins her case and goes on to qualify, I’m sure Jack Straw can find her a similar place at one of his Titan prisons.

WTF?

Bloody Lawyers, Sexuality
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Max Mosley has won his privacy case against The News of The World – the judge held that Mosley’s S&M frolics with prostitutes, whatever their unsavoury nature, had ‘a reasonable expectation of privacy’.

I cannot get my head round this decision. Whatever else, when you pay for sex it isn’t private, any more than paying for a newspaper or using the internet is. I have a reasonable expectation that my email and browser history is private too – but it’s not, any more than paid for sex is.

Prostitution is a public transaction for money and hence can have no reasonable expaction of privacy. What’s more it’s illegal in some circumstances. This decision is just another drawing of the veil of secrecy over the moral bankruptcy of prominent people.

I never thought I’d say this but I’m on the side of the News of The World. I hope they appeal.

Instajustice

Bloody Lawyers, Dutch politics, IT is not magic pixie dust
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The Dutch minister of justice wants to block credit cards which were used to buy child porn (link in dutch). And he wants to do this as soon as the police notices that a particular credit card was used to buy child porn, without involving the courts. It sounds though and decisive, everything a minister in a bit of trouble (due to the Gregorius Nekschot case) needs to bolster his image. Very likely nothing will come of this of course, due to all those nastly little practical details that always derail bright ideas like this. Like, if the police knows somebody has used a credit card to buy child porn, why don’t they arrest them for it, rather than just blocking that credit card? How will the police get this transaction data anyway, and how will the credit card companies be sure it’s the police telling them to block a card and not J. Random Person with a grudge against the person whose card is blocked?

But most importantly, how will the police determine that said card hadn’t had its details stolen for use in some internet scam or other? You might think this a theoretical danger, were it not for what happened in the UK back when their police went fishing for child porn buyers, in Operation Ore. The Yorkshire Ranter has the details:

The killer fact? Many of the credit cards presented for payment don’t correspond to the server log – to put it more brutally, a mysteriously large number of people were paying up in advance but not taking delivery of their smut. In fact, quite a lot of the websites that used Landslide contained no porn, nor anything else, existing purely for fraudulent purposes. The M.O. was to get hold of a list of cards – a black market exists – set up an account, and then run a script that would charge small amounts (say £25) to each, hoping that the payments would go unnoticed.

This is why we have courts, because even when the police is correctly representing the facts as they know them they may very well be wrong about what’s going on. If you go through the courts, you have the chance to test if the police is right in their assumptions; if you don’t, you run a much greater risk of harming innocents, branding people as pedophiles because their stolen credit card data got used for dodgy data. Instajustice sounds great in a soundbyte, but in reality it doesn’t work.


Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.