Following The Law

The Trump administration is investigating Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, for stating, along with several outer members of Congress with military and intelligence backgrounds,  that military personnel do not need to follow illegal orders. Trump stated that Kelly is guilty of sedition and suggested he could be put to death. 

Kelly, a retired Navy captain and Democrat from Arizona, released a video last week with five other Democrats reminding active duty service members that they are legally bound to refuse unlawful orders. President Donald Trump called Kelly and the rest “traitors” for posting the video and suggested their “seditious behavior” could be punishable by death, later reposting a Truth Social post urging them to be hanged.

Veterans and supporters of Kelly say the video simply restates the clear language of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: unlawful orders are not to be obeyed.

The thing is that everyone in the military is very explicitly taught that they do not have to and should not follow illegal orders. I myself was taught this in high school. (I attended a military academy) 

It is well know in the military that "following orders" is not a defense. 

Apparently Trump and Hegseth believe loyalty is more important than following the constitution. I would not be surprised if Trump and company require military personnel to take an oath of allegiance to Trump. You know like Hitler did. 

There has been a slow breakdown of rule of law in our country. Lawyers, especially in family court, are often all but immune to criminal misconduct. Will our military be next? 

Judicial Behaviorism

 Why do judges misbehave? Because they can. 

In a written Statement for the Record submitted to the House Committee on the Judiciary, she recalled her painful experience of harassment at the hands of a D.C. federal judge, including “[her] attempts to report the mistreatment, how the system failed [her] when she tried to report, and [her] efforts to seek justice for herself and accountability for the misbehaving former judge.”

When she filed her complaint against the judge to the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure, she found out that there were very few legal protections from harassment and retaliation for law clerks who reported judges' misbehavior. Currently, judges are excluded from anti-discrimination laws, and in July 2021, Congress proposed a bill that would fix this: the Judiciary Accountability Act (JAA). The law would empower judiciary employees who experience abuse, harassment, and retaliation to sue judges under Title VII, along with a number of other measures that create more accountability for judges.

The bigger issue, as we have seen, is that even if the laws are fixed, judges, indeed all lawyers, are in practice treated like they are immune from violations of the law. 

A Somewhat Vague Perspective

From LinkedIn comes an article on family court corruption. The first couple parts summarize the issue
fairly well. The rest is pretty vague notions of what to do. Until litigants are prosecuted for perjury and lawyers and all officers of the court are prosecuted for the crimes they commit nothing will change. 

The Issue

Corruption in family courts can take many forms:

1. Biased judges and court staff
2. Inadequate training for court-appointed professionals
3. Conflicts of interest among court-appointed experts
4. Lack of accountability and oversight

The Consequences

The consequences of family court corruption can be devastating:

• Children being removed from loving parents without justification
• Parents being denied custody or visitation rights unfairly
• Families being subjected to unnecessary and costly litigation
• Children's well-being and safety being compromised

Solutions

To address family court corruption, we need:

1. Increased transparency and accountability within family courts
2. Improved training for judges, court staff, and court-appointed professionals
3. Stronger laws and regulations to prevent conflicts of interest
4. Greater support for families navigating the family court system

Guardian Ad Litem Corruption

One of the more egregious areas of corruption in our court system is the area of  guardian ad litems, who are court appointed representatives of the best interests of a child in legal proceedings, such as custody or abuse cases. The system is rife with corruption. 

This video illustrates the issue pretty well:

AI And The Lazy Judge

U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate in Mississippi used AI in a court order with resulted in bizarre reasoning. 

The order, issued July 20, was factually inaccurate — naming defendants and plaintiffs that weren’t parties to the case, misquoting state law and referencing a case that doesn’t exist — which led the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office to raise concerns.

Wingate then replaced the order with a corrected version, wiped the flawed order from the docket, and denied a request from the Attorney General’s Office to restore the original order with errors to the public docket. He refused to explain the errors, calling them “clerical” mistakes.

This is just lazy but I have no doubt the laziness has nothing to do with AI. I'd wager Wingate's other rulings, rulings where he did not use AI, reflect a similar level of illogical reasoning, albeit perhaps less obviously. 

The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse

Scientific American has an interesting article (sorry if it is pay-walled) titled, The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse—And How Courage Can Reverse It.

The gist of the article is that ethical collapse is self-reinforcing. Biologically. 

Researchers at University College London have described one biological basis for this habituation. While in an fMRI scanner, study participants played a game in which they could enrich themselves by deceiving others. The more people lied to other players, the more exaggerated their lies were likely to be the next time around. These habitual liars also showed reduced activation in the brain’s amygdala, which is involved in emotional arousal—and the lower their amygdala activation, the more flagrant their lies were in the next round of the game. The researchers believe gradual neural adaptation is at play: the more times people lie, the less emotionally distressing lying feels, which allows for increasing comfort in dangerous moral waters.

This I believe is what happens so often within family court. A lawyer skirts the edge of fraud thinking they are advocating for their client and then crosses the line. Once they do so, it becomes a habit. The same with judges and litigants. 

Unfortunately the normal way of operating in family court, as well as much of the legal system overall, has become unethical and often straight up criminal. 

However there is hope. The process works in the opposite direction as well. 

Yet moral snowballing can also happen in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, just as neural habituation can drive ethical collapse, it can also drive escalating spirals of virtue, in which one honest or brave action makes the next one easier to carry out. And because our brains adapt to repeated behaviors, movement in a given moral direction can persist—making it all the more critical to pinpoint where and how that movement begins.

Unfortunately the legal system will never reform on its own. How can this be changed? It isn't that hard. Laws and ethical rules which are already in place simply need to be enforced. If lawyers who commit fraud are disbarred and litigants who commit perjury are punished, we will quickly see a surge in ethical behavior. 

Real Life Ebbing Missouri

The excellent Oscar winning movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in which a mother put up billboards chastising law enforcement for not doing enough to solve the horrible murder of her daughter had a real life version in (coincidentally) St. Louis County Missouri. 

The real version chastises family court judges not law enforcement. Like the movie people are named.  

The person behind the effort was an elderly grandmother.