Cases on the Final
Here in no particular order are the cases appearing on the final exam, less of course the questions asked about them.
Entrapment?
John, an 18-year-old college freshman, tackled a history assignment that required research about people who affected change through civil disobedience. Sitting at his computer in his dorm room, John trolled through websites of rights, advocacy, radical, and militant groups. He followed a winding path that led him to groups like Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, the National Urban League, the Black Panthers, and Students for a Democratic Society. He went on to sites of radical religious and nationalist groups and organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba, RSS, National Liberation Front of Tripura, Hindutva, and Bodu Bala Sena. John eventually ended up on the website of the radical group, FundoAuctoritsas.org.
John’s family is only slightly religious and does not attend services regularly, nor do they discuss religious beliefs or moral values at home. John, a typical angst-ridden and confused teenager, feels the pull towards a belief system--any belief system--that can make sense of the world for him. As John made his way through posts on FundoAuctoritas.org, he was excited to find a local group that claimed to meet clandestinely twice a month to plan “events”. John went to the website every night for the next few weeks.
The site, however, was actually constructed and maintained by the FBI to find people with terrorist-leanings. He eventually started blogging about the perceived injustices in his school, his family, and his community. An FBI agent, posing as a local member of Fundo Auctoritas, started discussing upcoming “events” with John. The agent fed John fictional but convincing-looking news stories that noted the exploits of Fundo Auctoritas.
It took a few more weeks for the agent to convince John that Fundo Auctoritas’s causes were just, and that he should participate in the next planned “event”: a bathroom bomb to be detonated in a local Dallas mall. The agent told John that the explosive device would rupture pipes and flood the mall on a busy Saturday afternoon. As people fled, they would be showered at the exits with propaganda for Fundo Auctoritas, dispensed from containers concealed on the mall’s roof. The containers were triggered to deliver their payloads 30 seconds after the bathroom bomb. The agent told John that the bomb might hurt people, even though that wasn’t the primary intent. John knew (as did the FBI agent with whom he had been conversing) that the mall in question was the hangout for the popular clique from his old school: a group of teenagers he hated for bullying and embarrassing him most of his school days. He assured the agent that he was OK with some collateral damage to further the just causes of Fundo Auctoritas.
When John arrived at the pre-arranged meeting place outside the mall to assist in Fundo Auctoritas’s event, he was met by FBI agents and charged with felonies under the Patriot Act.
Writer Wrong?
In 1924, dying of tuberculosis in a Viennese sanitorium, Franz Kafka wrote to his lifelong friend, Max Brod, and instructed him that when he, Kafka, died, Brod should destroy all of Kafka's unpublished writings. Brod did not comply with Kafka's wishes. Instead he released the manuscripts for unpublished novels--The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika--works that firmly established Kafka as one of the foremost European writers of the twentieth century. Brod also retained about 40,000 pages of other writings, which he passed on to his secretary, Esther Hoffe. When she died, at the age of 101, her daughters inherited the unpublished writings, and kept their contents a deep secret. Recently, after a protracted court battle between the state of Israel and Hoffe’s daughters, Israel gained access to these writings. Israel plans to make the writings public. Kafka's situation is not the first time great literature was rescued from oblivion by a disobedient executor. Virgil was still polishing the Aeneid at the time of his death in 19 BCE. Tradition has it that he became ill and left instructions that the manuscript be destroyed. Augustus Caesar ordered the instructions be ignored, and the Aeneid was published with minor editorial corrections. It became, and has remained, a central work in the Western canon. The Aeneid is often acclaimed as the pinnacle of Latin literature.
Some authors, of course, have succeeded in such end-of-life housecleaning. Willa Cather died before completing a novel, Hard Punishments. Her editor and friend of thirty years, Edith Lewis, destroyed the unfinished manuscript, as per Cather's instructions. Nicolai Gogol didn't trust the task to anyone else, but burned the manuscript of a sequel to Dead Souls. Many people feel the world to be worse off for these losses.
Vladimir Nabokov's last work, The Original of Laura, was unfinished when the author died in 1977. He left strict instructions to destroy the manuscript, rather than publish it in its imperfect state. After 30 years of wavering over what to do, his son, Dmitri, released it for publication. Prepublication hype suggested the book might be “the literary event of 2009,” but the critics did not receive it well, finding it fragmentary and puzzling. While Nabokov scholarship has benefited, the larger literary public may not have.
Shot in the Dark
Joshua Moore, 64, and his wife, Carol, ran a fruit stand from the back of their truck every Saturday for 25 years in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. One Saturday morning in July 2006, 16-year-old Manny Harris, in a robbery attempt, struggled with Carol Moore. Joshua Moore shouted for Harris to back off. Harris backed off momentarily, but returned again more aggressively. Mr. Moore, who did not know whether Harris had a weapon, fatally shot him. Joshua Moore was charged with second-degree murder. Although North Carolina law recognized self-defense as a natural right, the trial judge instructed the jurors not to consider self defense or defense of a family member in their deliberations, and to return a verdict of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or voluntary manslaughter. Moore was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Moore spent several years and thousands of dollars defending himself in the courts. In 2012, the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned his conviction, finding that the trial court should have instructed jurors to consider in their deliberations, as Mr. Moore’s attorney had requested, that he was defending his wife.
Proponents of self-defense laws, such as the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground statutes, believe that Joshua Moore was unjustly prosecuted. As of July 2013, half of all U.S. states had a Castle Doctrine statute, which allows the use of deadly force in self defense or to protect one’s property or prevent home invasion. A fundamental principle of the Castle Doctrine is exemption of the home dweller from the duty to retreat. Duty to retreat requires persons threatened with harm to avoid using lethal force by removing themselves, if possible, from the threat. Another nineteen states have a Stand Your Ground statute, which goes beyond the Castle Doctrine. Stand Your Ground statutes protect the right to use deadly force in the face of a reasonable belief of threat to person or property, without an obligation to retreat from danger. Stand Your Ground statutes extend the right to use deadly force to any place a person has a legal right to be, not just the home.
Besides protecting innocent people who use deadly force in self-defense from physical harm, proponents point out that Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground statutes offer protection from litigation by assailants, or their survivors, who may sue for restitution. Opponents of Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground statutes assert that such laws allow killers to go unpunished. The perception of threat can be subjective, and it is nearly impossible to determine if threatening actions were provoked or situations manipulated to create an opportunity to use deadly force under the guise of self-defense.
Markus Kaarma and his wife, Janelle Pflager, had been burglarized twice in a three-week period in Spring 2014, shortly after moving from Washington state to Missoula, Montana. Thieves took several items, including cell phones and credit cards. Frustrated that police were unable to catch the burglars, and fearful for the safety of their ten-month old baby, Kaarma and Pflager set a trap to catch the thieves. They mounted a surveillance camera in their garage, and installed motion detectors outside. On the evening of 26 April 2014, Pflager placed a purse far inside the garage and the couple left the garage door open. Shortly after midnight, motion detectors alerted the homeowners that someone was approaching, and the surveillance camera showed a stranger rummaging in the garage. Diren Dede, 17, was “garage-hopping,” a trend among Missoula teenagers who enter garages to steal small items, often alcohol. While Pflager recorded pictures from the surveillance camera and called 911, Kaarma picked up a shotgun, went out the front door, and shot four blasts into the dark garage. When Pflager turned on the lights and saw that Dede was wounded, she and Kaarma tried to administer life-saving procedures until help arrived. Dede died later that morning, and Kaarma was charged with deliberate homicide. Kaarma’s attorney said that his client, fearful of danger to his family, was justified in using deadly force under Montana’s Castle Doctrine.
$15,000 Baby
In 2014, Apple and Facebook announced that they would add egg-freezing to their employees’ compensation packages—a generous financial incentive to women interested in the procedure, as each round of egg retrieval can cost between $10,000 and $15,000. Though in the past egg-freezing was often used by women who underwent perimenopause early or by those who received chemotherapy, today this new perk might be used to attract young female employees interested in delaying motherhood. As companies struggle to hire and retain women, offering egg-freezing benefits may allow employers like Apple to hold on to some of its most ambitious employees: women who want to “have it all,” with both a career and motherhood. Both Apple and Facebook have explained that they are simply responding to employees’ demands, with Apple adding that the company wants to make sure that its female employees “do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.” Brigitte Adams, an employee at a tech company, seems to agree: “I would equate it to . . . adoption assistance . . . [I]t’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s definitely a nice perk.”
Though egg-freezing is no longer an experimental technology, it does come with risks. Before eggs can be harvested via outpatient surgery, women have to inject themselves with strong hormones. When women decide to use the eggs, there is only a 30% chance that the implanted zygote will result in the birth of a child. Moreover, the older women get and the more rounds of egg retrieval they undergo, the lower the odds of success. For this reason, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has declared that they “cannot at this time endorse its widespread elective use to delay childbearing.”
Indeed, sociologist Rene Almeling and historians Joanna Radin and Sarah Richardson have expressed the worry that egg-freezing benefits represent a failure of corporate policy to see childbearing and childrearing as a human need, instead of an inconvenience that needs to be solved through technological innovation. Policies that support childbearing and childrearing as a human need emphasize paid leave and view family life not as a hindrance but rather as something that can be compatible with high performance at work. However, instead of empowering women and allowing them to take control of their fertility, egg-freezing may pressure women to delay motherhood in order to be perceived as “serious employees.” If the intention is to make the workplace more amenable to women, companies could instead address the systemic problems faced by working mothers, such as “the limited availability of subsidized care for preschool children, the resistance of corporate culture to flexible or reduced hours for the parents of young children, the lack of federally mandated, paid family leave.”
Monumental Questions
Memphis, Tennessee bears deep scars of the American civil rights movement. Images of the Lorraine Hotel and sanitation workers picketing with placards declaring “I Am a Man” remain vivid in the memories of many here. Now the city is embroiled in a dispute that pits those who seek to honor the struggle of African Americans against others who champion less recent history. In February 2013, the Memphis City Council voted to rename three parks that honored the city’s Confederate past. Confederate, Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest parks now bear generic names, i.e. not military, whilst the Council considers permanent ones recommended by an ad hoc Council committee in April 2013.
Most observers considered the Council’s action a preemptive move to circumvent in part the intent of the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013, a bill that was moving through the Tennessee Statehouse at the time. This act, signed by the Governor on 1 April 2013, prohibits changing the name of parks, inter alia, currently named for “any historical military figure, historical military event, military organization, or military unit.” Had the City Council of Memphis not acted when it did, the city would have been stuck with the original park names in perpetuity.
Those who support the City Council measure contend the former park names evoke a racist past and were offensive in a city of largely black residents. Others simply worry that confederate themed names make it more difficult to attract new businesses to the city by sending the wrong message about its values.
Southern heritage groups, on the other hand, believe the renaming threatens historical knowledge, even though the parks in question do not mark battlefields and are not located on sites of historic events. Chris Barker, a local Ku Klux Klan leader goes further. Quoted in the 28 March 2013 New York Times, he claims that “[t]he Memphis City Council is basically trying to eradicate white people out the history books across America.”
Both Confederate and Forrest Parks were dedicated in the early 20th Century. The former was a memorial to the Civil War. In 1904 the bodies of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and his wife were re-interred in Forrest Park. Jefferson Davis Park was opened in the 1930s and named for the Confederate President who lived and worked in Memphis from 1869 until his death.
Seeking a compromise, some in Memphis suggest adding history to the city rather than taking it away. For instance, the same New York Times article reported that Doug Cupples, a history professor from Memphis, called for reinstating the original names of the parks and also building more monuments to honor African American leaders. Illustrating just how intractable the issue has become, the newspaper subsequently quoted Baptist minister Keith Norman as equating the restoration of the park names as akin to honoring Nazis in modern Germany.