Mangino joins Julie Grant on Court TV

Watch my interview with Julie Grant on Court TV to discuss the case of Leilani Simon accused of murdering her son Quinton.

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Creators: The Ethical Failings of Atticus Finch

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
April 22, 2024

On Christmas day 1962, Universal Pictures released the film “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The movie was based on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The film adaptation earned Gregory Peck an Academy Award.

The story takes place during the Depression in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. The narrator’s father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer and state legislator, is appointed to represent Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman.

Many scholars have studied the implications of Lee’s work. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is one of the most-read literary works in American history with over 30 million copies sold. The book has been cited for its influence on the civil rights movement, and the character of Atticus Finch has been lauded as the model father, as well as possessing the integrity and temperament for which all lawyers should aspire.

However, at times, Atticus Finch did not display the “ethics” worthy of a trial lawyer or the “integrity” of an officer of the court.

In the courtroom, Finch was cross-examining the alleged rape victim Mayella Ewell. In the middle of questioning Mayella, Finch grabs an empty drinking glass from a table and tells the defendant Tom Robinson to stand up. He throws the glass to Tom who catches it with right hand. Tom tosses it back and Finch says, “Now catch it with your left hand.” Robinson, not yet sworn as a witness, answers, “I can’t use my left arm, Mr. Finch.” A crucial revelation for the defense.

This should have resulted in a mistrial – it didn’t because the all-white, all-male jury already knew the trial’s outcome, and so did the prosecution. Having the defendant offer testimony unsworn is certainly an ethical transgression, something no competent lawyer would do or even consider.

While we remember Finch as a heroic figure who stood up to racism and tried to save the life of a Black man in a racist Southern town, Finch tolerated racism and even made excuses for it.

More than a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Finch in the New Yorker. Gladwell laments that Atticus Finch lauded the “character” of racists in Maycomb.

Gladwell examined Finch’s thoughts about Walter Cunningham, a Maycomb man who attempted to lynch Tom Robinson, “Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is ‘basically a good man,’ who ‘just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.'”

Finally, after Robinson is convicted, and later killed while trying to escape, Robert Ewell, Mayella’s father, attacks Finch’s children while walking home one evening from a school function. Spoiler alert: Finch’s neighbor Boo Radley, a shy, introverted recluse rescues the children and carries Finch’s injured son home.

It turns out Ewell was dead. He had been stabbed with his own knife. Sheriff Heck Tate comes to Finch’s home, and although initially reluctant, Finch agrees with Sheriff Tate not to bring Boo Radley into the spotlight of an inquiry or trial. “Let the dead bury the dead” says the sheriff. He tells Finch, “Bob Ewell fell on his knife.” Finch is complicit in the cover-up of a homicide.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” examines a number of significant issues (race, gender, poverty, domestic violence, courage, and cowardice) through the lens of a rural Southern criminal justice system. The story also reveals the challenges that face all of us when trying to be consistent with our values and beliefs. Even a revered character like Atticus Finch struggled with right and wrong.

The book and the film are timeless classics. Every critical reading or viewing provides new insight into the layered characters and, more importantly, into the struggle to understand what Lee had in mind when she brought this drama to life nearly 65 years ago.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com

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What happens if Donald Trump is elected from prison?

According to The New York Times, “We’re so far removed from anything that’s ever happened,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s just guessing.”

Legally, Mr. Trump would remain eligible to be president even if he were imprisoned. The Constitution says nothing to the contrary. “I don’t think that the framers ever thought we were going to be in this situation,” Professor Levinson said.

In practice, the election of an incarcerated president would create a legal crisis that would almost certainly need to be resolved by the courts.

In theory, Mr. Trump could be stripped of his authority under the 25th Amendment, which provides a process to transfer authority to the vice president if the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” But that would require the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare Mr. Trump unable to fulfill his duties, a remote prospect given that these would be loyalists appointed by Mr. Trump himself.

More likely, Mr. Trump could sue to be released on the basis that his imprisonment was preventing him from fulfilling his constitutional obligations as president. Such a case would probably focus on the separation of powers, with Mr. Trump’s lawyers arguing that keeping a duly elected president in prison would be an infringement by the judicial branch on the operations of the executive branch.

On the federal charges only, he could also try to pardon himself — or to commute his sentence, leaving his conviction in place but ending his imprisonment. Either action would be an extraordinary assertion of presidential power, and the Supreme Court would be the final arbiter of whether a “self pardon” was constitutional.

Or President Biden, on his way out the door, could pardon Mr. Trump on the basis that “the people have spoken and I need to pardon him so he can govern,” Professor Chemerinsky said.

But that wouldn’t apply to the New York or Georgia cases, because the president does not have pardon power for state charges.

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Trump trial underway: First former president to be tried for a crime

 Prosecutors in the first criminal trial of an American president began laying out their case for a jury of 12 New Yorkers on Monday, saying Donald J. Trump engaged in a conspiracy to cover up a sex scandal in order to get elected president in 2016, reported The New York Times.

The first witness called was the tabloid publisher David Pecker, whom prosecutors described as one member of a three-man plot to conceal damaging stories — including a porn star’s account of a sexual tryst — as Mr. Trump mounted his bid for the presidency.

Mr. Pecker was on the stand for only a few minutes in the afternoon before court adjourned for the day. He described how his publication, The National Enquirer, paid for stories, a practice he called “checkbook journalism.” He is expected to return to the stand on Tuesday.

Matthew Colangelo, one of the prosecutors for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the jury in his opening statement that the case was about “a criminal conspiracy and a coverup,” describing how Mr. Trump, his longtime counsel Michael D. Cohen, and Mr. Pecker engaged in a strategy to “catch and kill” negative stories.

The lead lawyer for Mr. Trump, Todd Blanche, insisted in his opening statement that the former president had done nothing wrong. “President Trump is innocent,” he told the jury. “President Trump did not commit any crimes.”

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Murders, rapes and robberies down in NYC--random assaults on the rise

Just before noon last Saturday, a 9-year-old girl was with her mother at Grand Central Terminal when a man strode up to the child and, without warning, punched her in the face, according to the police, reported The New York Times.

The child, dizzy and in pain, was taken to the hospital. Jean Carlos Zarzuela, 30, a man who had been staying in a homeless shelter in East Harlem, was quickly arrested and charged with assault in the third degree, harassment and endangering the welfare of a child.

It was the second time in nine days that Mr. Zarzuela had randomly attacked someone at the terminal, the police said. On April 4, they said, he punched a 56-year-old woman in the face, causing her nose to bleed and her left eye to swell shut.

And it was among a number of recent assaults that have unnerved New Yorkers, who have seen a rash of attacks reported on the streets and on the subway.

Police leaders and Mayor Eric Adams have trumpeted sharp decreases in the number of murders, rapes, robberies and burglaries since 2022, when crime rates began to fall in the city following a surge of violence during the coronavirus pandemic. Most major crimes remain at a higher level than they were in 2019, but officials said the trend was a promising sign that the city is rebounding.

Still, assaults continue to vex police and city leaders. Felony assaults, a major crime category defined as an attack where a dangerous weapon is used or a serious injury results, are up in recent years. So are misdemeanor assaults, such as the one at Grand Central, in which a victim is punched, kicked or hit but no weapon is used.

In 2023, there were just under 28,000 felony assaults in New York City, an increase of about 1,650 from 2022. And the number is rising in 2024: The police reported 7,419 felony assaults through April 14, a slight increase from the same time last year. The number of misdemeanor assaults was up 7 percent through April 14 compared with last year.

“They’re almost impulsive acts,” said Kenneth Corey, former chief of the department. “Those are very, very difficult to police because of the very unpredictable nature of the action. It’s not the type of crime that the police can strategically deploy against.”

And it is their seeming randomness that unsettles New Yorkers, he said.

“Your chances of being a victim of a shooting in New York are very small,” Mr. Corey said. 

But the number of assaults in the city is far higher than the number of murders or shootings. And even in a city of more than 8 million people, the possibility of being suddenly attacked without provocation has also begun to feel too real, he said — regardless of statistics.

“That’s not perception. That’s their reality,” Mr. Corey said. “That things are not as safe as they used to be.”

What is an assault?

Under New York law, misdemeanor assault is fairly simple: It is defined as intentionally striking another person, causing injury.

But an assault rises to the level of a felony when a dangerous or deadly weapon is used or when the injury is so serious that a person was at a substantial risk of death, is disfigured, is expected to experience long-term health problems or hurts or loses an organ during the attack.

A person can also be charged with a felony for striking public employees such as police officers or paramedics, even if a weapon is not used. Criminal justice specialists noted that the number of felony assaults began to rise after the State Legislature began classifying more public employees as victims of felony assault if they were struck.

Like other crimes in the city, the number of felony assaults has fluctuated over the past 20 years, falling to its lowest level in 2008, when the city recorded 16,284 such assaults. Amid some minor fluctuations, the number of misdemeanor assaults fell from 57,304 in 2000 to 33,400 in 2020. But that figure increased by 32 percent to 44,151 last year.

Officials noted some promising signs on the subway system, where about 1,000 police officers recently began patrolling and 1,000 members of the National Guard and the State Police were deployed after a surge in crime. Felony and misdemeanor assaults on the transit system both fell last month and are about the same through April 14 compared with last year, according to transit bureau figures.

What is driving the numbers?

It is unknown how many assaults in the city are truly random, according to the police, who say it is difficult to track the number of unprovoked attacks because investigators often learn later that the victim knew the perpetrator.

The police classify felony assaults under several different categories including domestic violence, attacks on the police, attacks on people over 65 and shootings. The remainder of the victims fall under the category of “other.”

Domestic violence incidents made up more than 40 percent of the felony assaults in 2023, according to the police.

Assaults on the police made up a little more than 8 percent of felony assaults. Shooting victims made up about 4 percent of the cases, while the number of assaults on people more than 65 years old was up nearly 8 percent.

Assaults on public safety officials have risen as the number of arrests has also increased. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority saw a jump in the number of attacks on its police officers and workers — from 23 assaults in 2019 to 65 in 2023. The assaults often happened when officers were stopping people from evading fares, an M.T.A. spokesman said.

“The increase on assaults on police officers isn’t surprising,” Mr. Corey said. Suspects, especially those arrested in cases of violent crimes, “are going to fight when they’re arrested.”

The persistence of domestic violence incidents as a driver of felony assaults is another troubling trend, and one that often leads to tragedy, said Nathaniel M. Fields, chief executive of the Urban Resource Institute. He pointed to an annual report commissioned the city, which analyzed domestic violence deaths from 2010 to 2022. In that time period, there were 420 cases in which someone was killed by an intimate partner. In 39 percent of those cases, the police had documented a domestic incident before the death, according to the study.

Maureen Curtis, the vice president of the criminal justice program at Safe Horizon, said she believed that there was not the same sense of urgency around domestic violence as for crimes that are more visible or are more likely to make headlines.

“As a society, we still don’t value domestic violence the way we do the other crimes,” she said. “People still don’t see it impacting them.”

What can be done to reduce assaults?

On Monday, Mayor Adams announced a plan to help find permanent housing for domestic violence victims living in city shelters with their children.

The plan, part of a $43 million effort to push gender equity programs in the city that would concentrate on women of color and people in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, would start with 100 families, he said.

The city’s study found that Black women were more than twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence homicides as any other racial or ethnic group.

The mayor’s plan is a good start, Ms. Curtis said.

Lack of permanent housing often leads victims of domestic violence to return to abusive partners, she said. “We still need to find more affordable housing for the thousands of survivors in New York City,” she said.

Mr. Fields said higher salaries and better working conditions for social workers who help domestic violence victims were also necessary. In March, Mayor Adams announced an agreement with the city’s human services workers that will give them a 9 percent raise over the next three years.

Addressing the city’s growing struggle with those with mental health problems is also critical, according to law enforcement officials.

On Wednesday, Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, said the department would be deploying a squad of police officers with degrees or experience in clinical psychology and social work to the subways to identify people in crisis and connect them with services.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, called on Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature to “make good on their earlier support for significant investments in mental health care — especially for New Yorkers who have been struggling, posing potential dangers to themselves and others.”

It was a call echoed by the police during a briefing with reporters this past week, where Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives, described a series of “unprovoked attacks” in the precincts covering southern Manhattan.

Many of the perpetrators were homeless, he said.

“The majority of them,” Chief Kenny said, “seem like they need some kind of help with mental illness.”

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Mangino provides legal analysis for WFMJ-TV21

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Mangino discusses Chad Daybell trial on Court TV

Watch my interview with Julie Grant on COURT TV discussing the Chad Daybell capital murder trial.

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