[m_t_yeo]

The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

Question ...

Is it fair for a professional association to remove your certification or licence for a vehicular offense you have committed that is unrelated to your profession in any way?

Remember these points before you answer:

1) You are *already* being punished by the court in the form of jail time and/or probation directly in relation to committing the offense. Whatever your professional association metes out would be in addition to those penalties.

2) People without professional accreditation don't suffer these additional penalties, even though you do.

3) Your accreditation certifies that you have x education, y experience and have passed z standards tests. Even after the offense ... you still have the knowledge and experience and have still passed the standards tests.

4) Apprenticeship/journeyman's papers, steam tickets, diplomas, degrees, union memberships, IT certifications, etc. are all certification in some form and could potentially be penalized in the same way as the licence to practice law.

5) Removing one's right to function within society by putting them in jail also removes their effective ability to practice their profession. Removing the *right* to practice that profession is mostly superfluous.

6) There is another licence - the driver's licence - that is directly linked to the commission of the offense.

Personally, I think Janklow should still be rotting in jail and should lose his driving privileges forever ... but I don't understand what his driving has to do with his being a lawyer at all.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

It was willfull negligence that killed Scott. Janklow, a lawyer, would know that.

I knew that, too, and I'm not a lawyer. Basic knowledge of traffic laws is within the grasp of all but the simplest of us. If you can read, you can read the DSM, and it is your driver's licence that verifies that knowledge for the rest of society, not your licence to practice law. Knowing laws to a higher standard doesn't make lawyers better drivers, just better lawyers.

A priest having molested a child years ago just once, isn't hurting his congregation today?

What a bad example. Molesting a child is an act of commisson. There is a victim, a perp, and a conscious choice by the perp to directly inflict harm on the victim. Janklow accidentally killed someone through being an idiot, which is a very, very different thing. There is a reason we have a difference between Murder One and lesser crimes like Vehicular Homicide, right? That difference is intent.

Secondly, a priest's job is directly related to the crime you describe: there are children at Sunday School and his crime was against children - direct link. You can be a terrific lawyer without ever putting your hands behind the wheel of a car.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

You need to separate the court from the bar.

The court put Janklow in jail, then probie. That was his 'sentence' and both you and I agree that it was far, far too light. I want him back in jail and I don't want him to drive ever again.

The bar, though, is not the court. It is a professional association whose sole function is to certify lawyers so that the public knows that its members meet a certain minimum standard. It is to keep us from getting bilked by bad lawyers, in effect. If Janklow had been convicted of being a terrible lawyer or of bilking his clients of money - crimes directly related to being a lawyer, then it would be reasonable to expect the bar to suspend his licence because that is its job, after all - to keep bad lawyers off the streets.

Its job is not to keep bad drivers off the streets, though. That's the job of the courts.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

You have to be clearer, though. Ethics is a pretty general term.

Clinton didn't break any laws by sleeping with Monica. He violated the vague ethical trust of his position in society's opinion, and so was asked to step down and put on the grill for his actions. He didn't violate the ethical code of any professional associations, though, because he wasn't a member of any and wasn't acting as a representative of one. He might not have violated his personal ethics at all!

Did Janklow violate some bylaw of the ND bar association? If not, he should never have lost his licence and people shouldn't be bleating about him getting it back.

What people *should* be bleating about is that he is on the street at all. It is the court's jurisdiction to enfore our laws and impose penalties for breaking them, and it dropped the ball big time on this one.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: Just to be clear.

LOL. Clinton knew that what he was doing would get him into trouble, which is why he lied in the first place, but I honestly don't think he considered it 'wrong' in a moral sense. I think he was perfectly fine with his actions on a personal scale. This illustrates, perfectly, the different uses of the word 'ethics'. The context means everything.

 

[m_t_yeo]

There are lots of politicians like this. DeLay insists that taking free trips, money and favours in exchange for help in dealing with the government is perfectly acceptable. He insists that he hasn't done anything wrong because he likely thinks this is just how things get done in the capitol.



I imagine that anyone who gets a taste of power starts to think like this eventually.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: Who Lied?

Longride, you are missing one very, very important piece of the puzzle with your long line of quotes.

These people do not have access to all the intelligence because they are not in the administration. They say what the administration gave them to see ... nothing more. When all you get to see is a bunch of lies and fabrications because the administration is making sure that is all you see ... you tend to believe those lies.

There are even Republican Congressmen publicly saying that they feel duped by the Administration.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

Intent matters quite a bit when it comes to recidivism, and this is why there are several degrees of offenses that all relate to someone dying, from Manslaughter on up to Murder One.

An offender that planned to kill someone and was fully in control of his faculties the whole time (Murder One) is the most likely to reoffend by far. Offenders who killed someone as a crime of passion (Murder Two) are less likely because the odds of a circumstance like the one that sparked the killed are unlikely to re-occur. They still tend to re-offend more than people who kill by accident (Manslaughter) because they have shown that extremely stressful circumstances can drive them to murder. Offenders convicted of Manslaughter are highly unlikely to reoffend, because the death was generally an accident and killing someone by accident tends to decrease the offender's risk taking behaviour in the future.

I don't know if Janklow's case goes as far as your example. Your shooter fully intended to take a gun to a crowded area to start shooting. His intent was to put those people in danger and to drastically increase their chance of dying - on purpose. Janklow didn't intend to kill the biker. He also didn't go out onto the road specifically to put people into danger for kicks. He knew that by driving drunk and turning around just past the crest of a hill on a busier road he was increasing people's risk (the negligence part), but his *intent* was to turn around and go the other direction.

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

LOL. This is how attorneys work - they split hairs.

I wan't actually thinking about Janklow when I wrote the original post. The guy was a **** and the criminal justice system dropped the ball, si I'm all for the bar doing their part to punish him for his behaviour. Its the wrong avenue for punishment, but any punishment is better than none.

I was thinking of Joe Sixpack. Some people have tons of trouble learning, so getting one's electrician's papers could be a major ordeal for someone. To have the apprenticeship board take those papers away, even though the state has already punished you for your crime, seems both unnecessary and excessive. A ditch digger can still earn a living coming out of jail, so why shouldn't an electrician?

 

[m_t_yeo]

Re: The Devil's Advocate speaks ...

It sounds like he was a jerk, and everyone wants to see a jerk get his comeuppance. To see a jerk get a slap on the wrist for a crime that would normally get a much stiffer sentence turns people's stomachs, so I'm not surprised at the anger and vehemence.

The probem with accidents like this is that sometimes jerks commit them, usually because they are jerks and don't even think about anyone else around them. Sometimes, though, they are committed by non-jerks who made a mistake. The laws have to be fair to both.