Sterling

[RBP]

Okay so we all know the story... maybe I missed the thread.

But... a private conversation of protected speech in a private home that I believe was recorded illegally can determine property rights?

Really?

I am with Mark Cuban on this one.

============================================

DALLAS — Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban called Donald Sterling’s purported comments about minorities “abhorrent” while saying he didn’t think the NBA could force him out as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Speaking in Dallas’ locker room before Game 4 of a first-round series against San Antonio on Monday night, Cuban said he trusted Commissioner Adam Silver to “operate under the best interest of the NBA.”

The outspoken billionaire said it was a “slippery slope” to suggest that Sterling should be forced out as owner over comments made in the privacy of his home.

“What Donald said was wrong. It was abhorrent,” Cuban said. “There’s no place for racism in the NBA, any business I’m associated with. But at the same time, that’s a decision I make. I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do. It’s a very, very slippery slope.”

Two days earlier, Cuban declined to give his opinion over the brewing saga of the racist comments that Sterling is alleged to have made in a taped conversation.

While he was more forceful in his rebuke of Sterling in front of about two dozen reporters Monday, Cuban questioned how the league would legislate other forms of discrimination.

“How many people are bigoted in one way or the other in this league?” Cuban asked. “I don’t know. But you find one, all of a sudden you say well, you can’t play favorites being racist against African-Americans. Where do you draw the line?”

Asked if the league would be better off without Sterling as an owner, Cuban said, “At this point, yes.”

“But that has nothing to do with the rules that we have to live by,” Cuban said. “There’s a lot of things I don’t agree with that by letter and rule of law has to happen anyway. When you live in a country of laws, you want to support the laws.”

Cuban noted that he recently fought the Securities and Exchange Commission over claims that he broke laws on insider trading. And he has remained outspoken against the SEC since he won the civil lawsuit the agency filed against him over the sale of his shares in an Internet company.

“Yet I still support the rule of law,” Cuban said. “There’s a reason why we have a (league) constitution. It’s worked for 50, however many years. It will continue to work.”


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTWtRHZhFp4

[DemonGeminiX]

Recorded illegally? It was recorded by a private citizen in a private conversation. How is that illegal? No warrant is needed, since no law enforcement is involved. They were both participants in the conversation, hence no wiretapping/eavesdropping laws were broken. There's nothing illegal about the recording whatsoever.

[RBP]

Recorded illegally? It was recorded by a private citizen in a private conversation. How is that illegal? No warrant is needed, since no law enforcement is involved. They were both participants in the conversation, hence no wiretapping/eavesdropping laws were broken. There's nothing illegal about the recording whatsoever.


California's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. California makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, including a private conversation or telephone call, without the consent of all parties to the conversation. See Cal. Penal Code § 632. The statute applies to "confidential communications" -- i.e., conversations in which one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation. See Flanagan v. Flanagan, 41 P.3d 575, 576-77, 578-82 (Cal. 2002).

Source: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-recording-law



Under California penal law, it is a crime to intentionally record a confidential conversation without the consent of the person or persons being recorded. This type of eavesdropping also empowers victims of the unlawful recording to sue for money damages.

Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nba/news/20140426/donald-sterling-la-clippers-adam-silver-nba/

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Sorry, you can't un-ring the bell. The information is out there and how it got out there is of no concern to the NBA and the welfare of the league. And now that it's out there, and with Sterling's past as precedent, he is in violation of the NBA Constitution and he can be legally forced out as owner of the Clippers.


Article 13(a) lays out the process for voting an owner out of the league:


The Membership of a Member or the interest of any Owner may be terminated by a vote of three fourths (3/4) of the Board of Governors if the Member or Owner shall do or suffer any of the following:

(a) Willfully violate any of the provisions of the Constitution and By-Laws, resolutions, or agreements of the Association.

And nowhere have I read that Sterling is claiming that he didn't know he was being recorded. Allegedly there is more than 100 hours of his racist ranting. You would have to be a fucking idiot to have your conversations recorded for more than 100 hours and not know about it.

[FBD]

You would have to be a fucking idiot to have your conversations recorded for more than 100 hours and not know about it.

either that or a really big target. was being a racist against the bylaws?

Sterling should tell the NBA to fuck off with their 2 million dollar fine, if they are indeed kicking him out of the club.

from Kareem:

"So, if we’re all going to be outraged, let’s be outraged that we weren’t more outraged when his racism was first evident. Let’s be outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars.

The big question is “What should be done next?” I hope Sterling loses his franchise. I hope whoever made this illegal tape is sent to prison. I hope the Clippers continue to be unconditionally supported by their fans. I hope the Clippers realize that the ramblings of an 80-year-old man jealous of his young girlfriend don’t define who they are as individual players or as a team. They aren’t playing for Sterling—they’re playing for themselves, for the fans, for showing the world that neither basketball, nor our American ideals, are defined by a few pathetic men or women."

[DemonGeminiX]

Source: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-recording-law

Same link:


If you are recording someone without their knowledge in a public or semi-public place like a street or restaurant, the person whom you're recording may or may not have "an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation," and the reasonableness of the expectation would depend on the particular factual circumstances. Therefore, you cannot necessarily assume that you are in the clear simply because you are in a public place.

Don't assume the circumstances under which this was recorded.

And you're original quote stated that:


conversations in which one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation.

It sounds to me that they're assuming that the recording party is a third party not involved in the conversation being recorded. Well, unless that one party is talking to themselves, then the party knows that the second party that was recording their conversation was listening in on a two party conversation where both parties are evidently present and accounted for. And no, I'm not being a smart ass for saying that. Lawyers think like this.

So this can be argued in multiple ways.

Personally, I don't like the law as it's stated because you can cherry-pick your stance. You could have situations like where that kid was being bullied and he recorded it on his cellphone, effectively gaining evidence to the crime which he was a victim of, and then a court judge doesn't see it for what it really is and charges the victim with a crime. Personally, I think that's wrong and the judge that ruled on it should be removed from the bench. Now tell me, do you think that the California law would be right in this instance?

Sure, she's a cunt for doing it, and she's a gold-digging whore to begin with, but she was involved in the conversation she recorded and depending on what part of the law you quote and how you argue it, and how the judge rules on it, it could go either way. Personally, I think that if it wasn't intended to be used in a court of law and law enforcement didn't compel her to record it, then it's legal, since she was a party involved in the conversation and law enforcement wasn't involved in a manner that would necessitate a bench warrant. That's the way it was presented to me in the criminal justice classes I studied in college and I think that's the way it should be. It used to be that if someone recorded a conversation they were involved in under their own initiative, then it would be admissible as evidence in a court of law, regardless of the other parties' knowledge of the recording. According to your argument and statement of that California law, that's not true, and I think that that's wrong.

But look at it this way: Sterling's a lawyer. And by all accounts, he's not a bad one either. If he knows for a fact that her recording their conversation was illegal and he could prove it in a court of law that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in this case, then in accordance to the law you quoted and your stance on it, he'd have absolutely no problem turning her into a stain on the sidewalk, legally-speaking.

We'll see what happens.

[RBP]

I would definitely sue. I don't claim to know the rules of evidence, but I would sure argue that an illegally obtained tape is inadmissable.

[FBD]

I'm not seeing where the NBA has any basis to tell this guy "he's not allowed to own a team any longer"

[RBP]

Donald Sterling Is a Vile Racist... But even a horrible human being doesn’t deserve to have his property stripped away.

On Tuesday, Adam Silver forcefully announced that his sport would not countenance a hateful racist. He banned Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the league for life and “will urge the board of governors to exercise its authority to force a sale of the team.” For Sterling to finally get his comeuppance, to feel the wrath of public opprobrium, and to lose his prime asset seems just. For the NBA, which was engaged in a decades-long battle with its longest-tenured, and worst, owner, this was a perfect opportunity to act swiftly and harshly.

Yet one has this niggling feeling that Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a point when he says, “If we're taking something somebody said in their home and we're trying to turn it into something that leads to you being forced to divest property in any way, shape, or form, that's not the United States of America.”

Removing Sterling as an owner will require a three-quarters majority vote of NBA owners. In his press conference, Silver said he expects he’ll have enough votes to oust Sterling. It’s unclear if Cuban will ultimately be one of those anti-Sterling voters—after the press conference, the Dallas owner tweeted, “I agree 100% with Commissioner Silver’s findings and the actions taken against Donald Sterling.” But it’s likely that Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski is correct when he writes, “There isn’t a franchise that could withstand public backlash of failing to vote with Adam Silver on Donald Sterling’s ouster.”

Indeed, it would be hard to imagine many owners willing to align themselves with Sterling, even if they were to portray their “no” votes not as an endorsement of the Clippers owner, but as a criticism of the process.

But the process does raise some troubling issues. A private citizen whose private thoughts were audio-taped (perhaps illegally) has been told he can no longer own his private property because of the thoughts that were revealed on that tape. These thoughts were loathsome to be sure, but didn’t advocate anything illegal and didn’t call for any violent or even literally hurtful actions.

To say that Sterling, with his long history of racism, sexism, parsimony, and obstreperousness, was a thorn in the side of the NBA is to do a disservice to thorns, which are sharp, strong, and affixed to a living thing. Sterling is a desiccated relic who squeezed every drop of profit out of his basketball team while caring nothing for his fans or employees. Having been lucky enough to buy the team for a pittance in the days when an NBA team was seen as no wiser an investment than a yacht, Sterling gamed the system by being as cheap as possible while the league got richer around him. His business dealings away from the NBA, which has unions and a salary floor, were worse, as he was famously fined millions of dollars for discriminatory housing practices. That should have been the flashpoint of a conflagration. But it wasn’t. It took an audio tape of Sterling telling his mistress that he didn’t want her seen with black people (though she reportedly is black and Mexican) to fully roast the 80-year-old.

I would argue that refusing to rent to black and Hispanic families is a far worse societal ill than decrying the presence of Magic Johnson on the Instagram account of your goomah. The NBA apparently didn’t think so, having never raised any kind of public ruckus about Sterling’s shameful, well-established behavior. It’s telling that Clippers coach Doc Rivers claims he “didn’t know a lot about” Sterling’s racism before he accepted his current position.

A swift beheading by the commissioner robs players and fans of a chance to foment justice on their own. Silver did a favor to the Clippers players who didn’t want to be put in the uncomfortable position of having to actually do anything beyond the symbolic in opposition to Sterling’s racism. Clippers fans, too, can continue to comfort themselves by explaining that they support their favorite players wearing their favorite jerseys, not the man who actually pays the players and supplies the jerseys. How great would it have been if there were a nationwide backlash against the Clippers, which might have not only convinced Sterling to sell, but actually depressed the value of the brand?


In accepting plaudits for serving as an exacting executioner, Silver also sidesteps the fact that his office—led by David Stern with Silver as his longtime No. 2—was for years an institutional enabler. The lesson of Donald Sterling seems to extend no further than Donald Sterling, and stretches no earlier than the revelations of the past week. In fact, injustice existed longitudinally and latitudinally, with the damage done by the NBA’s inaction reaching beyond that league’s offices. If the NBA had punished Sterling a long time ago, would Major League Baseball have approved Astros owner Jim Crane, despite his company having paid a multimillion-dollar settlement for allegedly having engaged in discriminatory behavior?

In his remarks before the Silver decision, Mark Cuban went on to say that in America people are allowed to be morons. That’s true, and proved every day in the halls of Congress, on cable television, and on barstools everywhere. This was a rare instance, though, where the anti-moron message could have been an authentic, populist one. Donald Sterling shouldn’t own the Clippers. But Cuban is right: The NBA shouldn’t divest the moron of his team.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/04/donald_sterling_ban_he_should_sell_the_clippers_bu t_the_nba_shouldn_t_force.html

[DemonGeminiX]

Ok, here's a question: Suppose they get a 3/4s vote and they remove Sterling from ownership. Does Sterling get reimbursed for the cost of the forced sale by the league?

:-k

[Pony]

http://i.imgur.com/bkw9Bjd.jpg

[RBP]

That's good Pony. But you forgot that only white people can be racist. :nono:

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Ok, here's a question: Suppose they get a 3/4s vote and they remove Sterling from ownership. Does Sterling get reimbursed for the cost of the forced sale by the league?

:-k

Yes, he gets all the money from the sale of the team, just as if he put it up for sale himself.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

That's good Pony. But you forgot that only white people can be racist. :nono:

I keep saying that all the time but nobody pays attention to it [-(

[RBP]

I keep saying that all the time but nobody pays attention to it [-(

I listen and care deeply about your thoughts and emotions, Lance. :hug:

:P

[Pony]

:gay:

[FBD]

I still dont get how they can force him to sell the team

[Acid Trip]

Yes, he gets all the money from the sale of the team, just as if he put it up for sale himself.

We'll see if he gets the full value after his comments. I heard the team was valued at $525 million.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Steve Gorman and Dana Feldman


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The audio recording of racist comments that got Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling banned from the NBA was made with his consent by the woman he criticizes on the tape for "associating with black people," her lawyer said on Thursday.

Los Angeles-based attorney Mac Nehoray also insisted that his client, who goes by the name of V. Stiviano, did not wish Sterling any ill will and had nothing to do with furnishing the recording to websites that released the audio over the weekend, igniting the racially charged scandal.

Instead, a copy of the tape was leaked by an unspecified friend to whom Stiviano had given the recording for "safekeeping" but who apparently "went rogue" for monetary gain, Nehoray told Reuters.

Nevertheless, Stiviano, seemed to be hinting weeks before the scandal broke that a big secret was about to be revealed, posting messages on the social networking site Instagram about "Skeletons in Closet" and "It's all coming out!"

Stiviano, 31, while not widely known to the public at large before this week's controversy, was a familiar fixture at Clippers games and charity events with the 80-year-old Sterling, and the two have frequently been photographed together.

Nehoray denied media reports linking the two romantically, however, saying, "there was no sexual relationship."

He said Stiviano was merely a friend of Sterling's who served as an informal "archivist" for him personally and was "in charge" of his philanthropic foundations.

SADDENED BUT SKATING

News of the National Basketball Association's lifetime ban against Sterling left Stiviano "very saddened," he said, despite the fact that local TV news cameras caught her casually roller skating outside her home that day, wearing shorts, a "Twinkie the Kid" T-shirt and large visor over her face.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in announcing the ban on Tuesday that Sterling had admitted to the NBA that the recording of his comments was authentic but did not apologize for them. Neither Sterling nor his lawyers have commented to the media since Tuesday.

Nehoray said the recording was made by Stiviano in September 2013 at her home with Sterling's knowledge and permission, and with a third person he did not name present in the room.

The lawyer declined to explain why Sterling gave his consent for the conversation to be taped but said the reason would likely be revealed in future litigation.

Stiviano was named as the defendant in a lawsuit brought in March by Sterling's wife, Rochelle, seeking to recoup marital community assets she claimed her husband gave to Stiviano without his spouse's consent.

Those gifts included $240,000 in living expenses, $1.8 million to buy an upscale duplex home in Los Angeles and several luxury cars, including a Ferrari and two Bentleys, according to the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Rochelle Sterling further claimed in her lawsuit that Stiviano was essentially a gold-digger, who seduced older wealthy men into lavishing her with money and expensive gifts.

Nehoray did not dispute that Sterling's generosity toward his client, but called the characterization of her as a seductress "totally absurd," adding, "she didn't ask for those gifts, he gave them to her."

"This is an action brought by a very angry wife whose husband is a highly public figure and who is well known to be 'keeping women' other than his wife and who has done so far very many years," he wrote in a court filing last month in reply to the lawsuit.

Nehoray said he did not believe Stiviano and Sterling had spoken since Tuesday, and he did not know the last time the two had communicated.

The Texas-born Stiviano, who is herself of African-American and Hispanic heritage, moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and changed her name some years ago from Vanessa Maria Perez, Nehoray said.

In addition to having done some modeling, she also worked for two years in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office helping to provide crime victims with procedural information, he said.

On Thursday, she politely declined to speak with a reporter who paid a visit to her Spanish-style two-story duplex, where a red Ferrari and a Bentley were parked in the driveway, saying through the door, "I'm not making any statements today."