Tennessee attorney general Paul Summers sent a warning letter (PDF) to country music star Gretchen Wilson (“Redneck Woman”) demanding that she stop pulling a can of Skoal smokeless tobacco out of her pocket on the concert stage; she’d been waving the can to illustrate a song about the “Skoal ring” outline in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Summers’s letter invoked the 1998 multistate tobacco settlement, although neither Wilson nor her concert venues ever signed that agreement or could be in any way bound by it; it went on to insinuate that Skoal’s manufacturer had procured her “promotion” of the product, an insinuation that turned out to be quite false, the singer’s representative explaining that she had had no dealings with the company. Nonetheless, perhaps fearful of suffering the fate of the much-boycotted Dixie Chicks, Wilson capitulated instantly and promised not to display the tin on stage any more, whereupon Summers expressed satisfaction (PDF) and called her a “good citizen”. Had the object of suppression been something other than tobacco, do you think by now we might have heard any outcry about artistic freedom or musicians’ rights of expression? (“Country singer Gretchen Wilson asked to keep smokeless tobacco in back pocket”, AP/CourtTV, Aug. 29; Gail Kerr, “Wilson put quick stop to spat over Skoal”, Aug. 31; CommonsBlog, Aug. 27; Nick Gillespie and Jacob Sullum, Reason “Hit and Run”, Aug. 29.) More: Will Wilson comments at the AEI Federalism Project’s AG Watch (Aug. 29).
Posts Tagged ‘Tennessee’
Book review in today’s WSJ
I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal (sub – $) with a generally favorable review of Sadakat Kadri’s new book “The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson“. A few excerpts from the review:
By 1880 the criminal trial as an institution had become standardized around the West to the point that readers on many continents found little that was unfamiliar in Dostoevsky’s account of the murder proceedings against Dmitri Karamazov. The lawyers popping up with objections, the witness box and table of evidentiary exhibits, the sensation-seekers filling the gallery — all were as common to the courthouses of San Francisco or Paris as to those of late-czarist Russia. Go back a few centuries to premodern Europe, though, and the forms of justice can seem to our eyes indescribably strange: trial by ordeal, by combat or by compurgation (the collecting of oaths from supporters) and so forth.
And yet the march of progress is not always quite so apparent. We may smile at the premodern practice of putting a pig or haystack on trial for having caused harm to a human being, yet our contemporary law abounds in forfeiture and pure-food cases with headings like United States v. 900 Cases of Peaches (1975) and United States v. One 1967 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible (1973)….
The continuities between past and present are many. Battles over jury selection, so typical today in big trials, propel the plot of Burnt Njal, a medieval Icelandic saga involving arson-murder and bloody retribution. The tendentious interpretation of ambiguous marks on witnesses’ bodies — a hideous aspect of the witch hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries — reappears in the child-abuse prosecutions of our own era. Denunciation boxes, into which citizens dropped accusing notes in Inquisition times, popped up in police stations across Russia in the 1930s. Hype-fraught celebrity trials? They date back pretty much forever and serve useful purposes, such as calling attention to social problems that would never stir public debate if left abstract….Regarding the emotionally manipulative style of some courtroom champions, Mr. Kadri finds plenty of precedent. He quotes the 1897 Tennessee Supreme Court, which said that “tears have always been considered legitimate arguments before a jury. Indeed, if counsel has them at his command, it may be seriously questioned whether it is not his professional duty to shed them whenever proper occasion arises.”
As for glittering but empty turns of courtroom rhetoric, Johnnie Cochran was just building on a tradition that goes back to Shakespeare’s time. “Elizabethan schoolboys,” Mr. Kadri writes, “were commonly taught adoxography, the art of eruditely praising worthless things….The first English treatise on the subject appeared in 1593 and contained essays celebrating deformity, ugliness, poverty, blindness, drunkenness, sterility, and stupidity. Its preface claimed that it would be particularly useful to lawyers.”
Read the whole thing here if you are a subscriber, or go out and buy a copy of the Journal. Incidentally, the Journal’s editors had to drop a couple of paragraphs of my original review draft for space reasons. Here they are:
* On the centuries-old practice of digging up the rotting remains of deceased persons to make them stand trial on criminal charges, a judge named Pierre Ayrault observed in 1591 that after all it is natural to regard the reputations of the dead as of continuing interest — wouldn’t we want to free a wrongly accused decedent from suspicion? That still didn’t explain why it would be needful to exhume a corpse, so Ayrault suggested a painting of the accused be hung in court instead.
* On the differences, some apparent and some real, between American and British justice: “Plea bargaining has never been given legal recognition in England. Barristers nevertheless haggle over pleas and judges give ‘indications’ of their likely sentences almost every day in almost every court of the land.” On the other hand, some differences are very real indeed, as with British judges’ power to summarize for jurors the weight of evidence in a case: “The summing-up invariably pays lip service to the principle of jury independence — typically, by ending a devastating criticism with the observation, ‘It is, of course, entirely a matter for you.'”
Sell gas to drunks, pay for their crashes
“The [Tennessee] Supreme Court has ruled that store owners can be sued for causing injuries in a drunken driving accident if they sold gas to an intoxicated driver.” Employees at an Exxon station on Rutledge Pike in Knoxville allowed Brian Lee Tarver to buy $3 worth of gas and even helped him pump it when he seemed unable to work the controls. Victims of his subsequent drunk-driving crash sued the station. “A University of Tennessee professor later determined that Tarver’s vehicle would have run out of gas before encountering West and Richardson if he had not been able to buy more fuel.” Will gas station employees, like bartenders, now need training on how to recognize signs of inebriation? And what are the justices planning to do about card-swipe self-service? (“State’s high court rules stores liable for selling gas to drunks”, AP/WVLT, Aug. 22; Jamie Satterfield, “Ruling says gas stations liable”, Knoxville News Sentinel, Aug. 22)(intrusive registration).
P.S. Here’s the opinion (PDF), courtesy reader Jay Johnson. And CoyoteBlog comments (Aug. 26).
No driver partitions in Greyhound buses? That’ll be $8 million
On Oct. 3, 2001, a mentally disturbed passenger from Croatia produced a box cutter and began slashing the driver of a Greyhound bus traveling between Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn. In the ensuing crash six passengers including the attacker were killed. Now, in one of many lawsuits proceeding from the incident, a jury has decided that Greyhound should pay $8 million to Sharon Surles, a Saginaw, Mich. woman severely disabled by the crash. On what theory, you ask, was the large intercity bus company negligent for not preventing the crazed attack?
[Plaintiff’s attorney Andrew Berke of Chattanooga] said that in the four years before the crash, Greyhound had at least 43 incidents of a passenger attempting to assault a driver or grab the steering wheel of a moving bus.
“Despite the prevalence of attacks, Greyhound never did anything to protect its drivers,” Berke said.
He said a Greyhound executive in 1997 had asked the manufacturer if they could “put protective barriers” between drivers and passengers.
(“Bus crash after driver cut prompts $8M verdict”, AP/Nashville Tennesseean, Aug. 12; Ian Berry, “Woman wins $8 million in bus crash”, Chattanooga Times & Free Press/MSNBC, undated). Forty-three incidents of assault over four years amounts to a rate of ten per year, not necessarily an impressive crime wave given that Greyhound is the dominant player in intercity bus transport and carried more than 21 million people last year. Moreover, the quote from the lawyer includes no intimation that any of the earlier assaults in fact led to crashes or serious harm to passengers. The best detail, however, is the one portraying the company as culpable because one of its execs once asked about the practicability of driver partitions after which no one seriously pursued the idea. If you’d like an ultra-conservative, cover-your-behind culture to grow up in a big company, just plant the idea that the employee who goes around asking questions about possible different ways of doing things is setting you up for grief down the road after some adverse lawyer portrays the inquiry in question as a smoking gun.
Attorney Berke told the AP that the giant bus company is now moving toward the use of driver barriers, but it’s hardly surprising that such steps would have been rejected in the security climate that preceded the fall of 2001. Drivers of New York City taxis, who are exposed to a far greater risk of passenger crime than drivers of Greyhound buses, widely dislike their city-required partitions of yellowing Plexiglas and tend to leave them open during daytime rides at least, according to a recent article in the New York Times (Sewell Chan, “Taxi Partitions, Born of Danger, May Be Set for a Makeover”, Aug. 9). It’s not even intuitively clear that driver partitions will on net reduce crime on buses, since one of drivers’ key safety duties is to keep order among passengers. What will happen the first time one passenger on a Greyhound bus assaults another while the driver, immurred behind his partition, either doesn’t notice what’s going on or can’t make his authority felt? Do you think the company might get sued then too? (via Day on Torts, who predictably takes the other side of the question).
Update: Joshua Flax v. Chrysler seat back case
We covered this case in detail Nov. 24 and Dec. 21. The court reduced punitive damages from $98 million to $20 million, which means that the total injustice is $23.75 million instead of $101.75 million. The AP version of the story doesn’t even acknowledge the auto company’s defense. (Randy McClain, “Judge slashes damages against carmaker”, The Tennessean, Jun. 21; AP, Jun. 21).
Lawyers Weekly USA has more details about the trial, including the fact that the jury wasn’t allowed to hear that, with 7.1 million vehicles on the road, there were only three deaths from collapsing seatbacks. Moreover, the judge permitted plaintiffs to argue liability based on a post-sale duty to warn of (allegedly) improved technology, unprecedented in Tennessee and most other states: thus, according to plaintiffs, when Chrysler merged with Mercedes, Chrysler had a legal duty to inform every single one of its car owners of any safety features on Mercedes vehicles that weren’t on Chrysler vehicles (and, one would imagine, vice versa). How this would have prevented a pick-up truck from slamming into the rear of a minivan at twice the speed limit, one wonders, but too many judges have stopped requiring causation to be an element of a tort. (Reni Gertner, “Parents Of Baby Killed In Seatback Collapse Win $105.5M”, Lawyers Weekly USA, Jan. 2005).
Update: Mohr v. DaimlerChrysler $53 million verdict
DaimlerChrysler statement on the suit after the jump; it’s almost scandalous what the press accounts (Feb. 26)left out, but not as scandalous as the verdict. The unbelted Vickie Mohr was killed from blunt force trauma to the back of the head–caused when she was hit by the 245-pound unbelted passenger in the backseat. (The jury found that passenger, Carolyn Jones, responsible for only a small percentage.) Brett McAfee, the 17-year-old driver who killed the two plaintiffs when he fell asleep at the wheel going 45 mph, but was found slightly less than half-responsible by the civil jury, pleaded no contest to vehicular homicide criminal charges. (via Dodgeforum, which has an impressive array of photos of the totalled Durango Caravan).
Update: Joshua Flax/Chrysler verdict
More press coverage on the $105 million collapsing seat verdict (Nov. 24). The Fulton County Daily Report spells out the plaintiff’s case, without much attempt at balance. A press release from the plaintiffs’ lawyers claims that Chrysler experts admitted that a “stronger” seat would not have collapsed and that other Chryslers have “stronger” seats–but leaves it ambiguous whether the first “stronger” is referring to something different than the second “stronger.” The artful phrasing in the release (instead of a straightforward statement about whether Chrysler’s experts admitted Joshua Flax would not have been hurt if he had been in a Mercedes), combined with the improbability that Chrysler would go to trial with such a fact pattern, suggests that this is sophistic equivocation. (R. Robin McDonald, “Partner Wins $105 Million Verdict Against Chrysler”, Fulton County Daily Report, Dec. 1; Butler Wooten press release, Nov. 23). The Detroit News has extensive followup coverage, featuring a photo of the totaled minivan from which five people walked away, and an interview with a NHTSA spokesman who notes that “If you merely increase seatback strength, you may be trading one set of injuries for another. These seats did exactly what they were designed to do.” (Jeff Plungis, “Trial puts spotlight on safety of car seats”, Dec. 19).
In the Detroit News article, Clarence Ditlow complains that there’s an increase in collapsing front seats hitting children in the rear seats–but that’s surely a result of fewer children being seated in the front, where they were in danger of passenger-side airbag injuries. (Airbag-child fatalities have declined from 60 in 1995 to 10 in 1999.) Indeed, as the Washington Post notes, notwithstanding their headline, child deaths per mile traveled is down, as is the long-run trend of total child deaths. The Post article also suggests areas where we will see future auto litigation as new safety features transition from optional to standard. I’ve worked defending an auto company in shift-interlock litigation, for example. (Greg Schneider, “Kids, at Risk and Neglected”, Washington Post, Dec. 5).
Jim Butler wins $105M verdict in Chrysler seat litigation
Another example of how personal injury attorneys and the “Center for Auto Safety” actually care very little about auto safety: In 2001, Louis Stockell, driving his pickup at 70 mph, twice the speed limit, rear-ended a Chrysler minivan. Physics being what they are, the front passenger seat in the van collapsed backwards and the passenger’s head struck and fatally injured 8-month old Joshua Flax. The rest of the family walked away from the horrific accident. Plaintiffs’ attorney Jim Butler argued that Chrysler, which already designed its seats above federal standards, should be punished for not making the seats stronger — never mind that a stronger and stiffer seat would result in more injuries from other kinds of crashes because it wouldn’t absorb any energy from the crash. (Rear-end collisions are responsible for only 3% of auto fatalities.) Apparently car companies are expected to anticipate which type of crash a particular vehicle will encounter, and design accordingly. The $105M verdict includes $98M in punitives, a number that will almost certainly be reduced, but the entire verdict is inappropriate. “It is unfairly punishing DaimlerChrysler for a reasonable engineering decision that resulted in a product that met all federal standards,” DaimlerChrysler spokesman Jason Vines said. (Rob Johnson, “Jury awards $105.5 M in baby’s death”, The Tennesseean, Nov. 24; Matt Gouras, AP, Nov. 24; “DaimlerChrysler Is Told to Pay $98 Mln in Van Crash”, Bloomberg, Nov. 23; Sheila Burke, “Chrysler being sued over baby’s van death”, The Tennesseean, Nov. 4). More coverage: Dec. 21.
Scruggs watch
Last week lawyers associated with uber-tobacco lawyer Richard Scruggs fanned out across the country to file a dozen lawsuits against thirteen large non-profit hospitals in eight states. According to one press account, the lawsuits allege that “the institutions are not living up to their charitable missions, are overcharging uninsured patients and are using overly aggressive collection tactics.” (Rob Kaiser, “Class actions filed against non-profit hospitals,” Chicago Tribune, June 18) Scruggs characterizes the litigation as his attempt “to stop profiteering by nonprofit hospitals.” (Bill Lewis, “St. Thomas among hospitals accused of ‘profiteering,'” Nashville Tennessean, June 18)
The Tennessean article further explains:
“The lawsuit said Saint Thomas unfairly benefits from its long-held tax-exempt status, and the suit alleges a breach of contract, consumer fraud and deceptive business practices because Saint Thomas and the other nonprofits allegedly haven’t provided enough charity care in return for their tax exemptions….
“He criticized the hospitals named in the lawsuits for charging what he said were their highest rates to patients who do not have insurance, while giving discounts to big insurance companies. If the poor or uninsured patients cannot pay their bills, the hospitals garnishee wages and bank accounts, seize houses and force people into bankruptcy, he said.”
University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, quoted in the Tribune article, had this reaction: “Dicky Scruggs has got a lot of money, and he’s looking for a lot of trouble,” Epstein said. “The question is, what’s the law that’s being violated?”
Muslim trucker: you can’t make me haul beer
In Nashville, Tenn., Ibrahim Barzinji has sued his former employer, Arkansas-based J.B. Hunt Transport Inc., on the grounds that asking him to transport alcoholic beverages violated his religious beliefs. Barzinji, who is representing himself in the case, “said he had just trucked a load of auto parts from Clarksville to St. Louis on June 26 last year when he was asked to pick up a return load at the Anheuser-Busch plant.” He informed his supervisor that he was refusing to handle the cargo, and was dismissed. “A local labor and employment attorney said that, to prove his case, Barzinji would have to convince a judge or jury that asking to be assigned a different load was reasonable and would not cause undue hardship on the company.” The issue has come up before in a somewhat different context: “Muslim cab drivers at the Minneapolis airport several years ago began refusing to pick up passengers who carried duty-free alcohol, said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.” (Anita Wadhwani, “Fired Muslim truck driver sues employer”, The Tennessean, Jun. 23).