Mississippi’s AG Cavorting with Trial Lawyers
July 28, 2010
Today’s WSJ editorial page lifts the curtain on the way Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s cozy relationship with the trial bar.
“Murky” Mutterings in Missouri
April 15, 2010
“Large amounts of money, some with murky origins, are pouring into a campaign aimed at changing the way judges are selected in Missouri,” ominously intones the Kansas City Star. What exactly are the “murky” backers of this campaign trying to achieve? Are they trying to sidestep the people by giving powerful special interest groups the right to control the judicial selection process? Do they want to keep the public in the dark by making judicial choices in secret, behind closed doors, with no accountability to the people? Are they aiming to game the system so that all judicial candidates come from the same political party?
Actually, that’s the system Missouri already has. Read more
More Trouble For The Trial Bar
February 11, 2009
Trial bar kingpin Dickie Scruggs is back in the news – this time for pleading guilty to trying to bribe another Mississippi judge. The WSJ Law Blog reports:
“[Scruggs] admitted he was involved in a scheme to entice Judge [Bobby] DeLaughter to rule in his favor in an asbestos case by promising he’d be apponted to the federal bench with help from Scruggs’s brother-in-law, former U.S. Senator Trent Lott…
“Neither Trent Lott nor Judge DeLaughter have been charged with wrongdoing, and both have denied wrongdoing.”
The latest guilty plea adds two years to the five year sentence Scruggs is serving.
Trial Lawyer Lobby Scores Several Big Victories — But Signs Of Hope In A Tough Election Year
November 5, 2008
Democratic state Supreme Court candidates – backed by the money and influence of the powerful trial lawyer lobby – scored several victories last night that could result in the rollback of important legal reform legislation and lead to a more lawsuit-friendly, anti-business environment. The trial bar also strengthened its grip on the judicial selection process in Kansas and Missouri. Yet rule-of-law judicial candidate also won races in many key states, providing signs of hope in an otherwise tough election cycle.
A 2008 election roundup:
Michigan: A “scathing” ad campaign financed by the Michigan Democratic Party along with Senator Obama’s landslide in the state helped Diane Hathaway upset Supreme Court Chief Justice Clifford Taylor. Ms. Hathaway’s victory will weaken the current rule-of-law majority on the court and worsen the business climate in Michigan’s already devastated economy.
Mississippi: Rule-of-law candidates captured three of the four Mississippi Supreme Court seats up for grabs. Although Chief Justice Jim Smith was upset by challenger Jim Kitchens, business-backed challengers Bubba Pierce and David Chandler defeated incumbents Oliver Dias, Jr. and Chuck Easley. Meanwhile, rule-of-law Justice Ann Hannaford Lamar beat back her challenger to retain her seat on Mississippi’s high court. The result should be a fairer, more predictable legal environment, which Gov. Haley Barbour believes is critical to attracting investment and jobs to Mississippi.
Louisiana: Greg Guidry won a pivotal seat on the state Supreme Court – a victory that is expected to help a rule-of-law majority take control of the high court.
Alabama: Republican Greg Shaw squeaked to victory over Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur in the race to fill the seat of retiring Republican Harold See. The Alabama Supreme Court will retain an 8-1 Republican majority.
“Merit” Selection: Residents of Johnson County, KS voted down a ballot initiative that would have restored the right to vote for county judges and ended the current “merit” selection process. In Greene County, MO, voters narrowly (by about 4,000 votes) approved an initiative to adopt “merit” selection, which has been used by all three Courts of Appeal and the Supreme Court in Missouri since 1945.
Wisconsin: Back in April, Wisconsin voters ousted Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler – who was appointed by a Democratic governor only after decisively losing his own bid for election and who promptly shifted the high court sharply toward the trial lawyer agenda.
All in all, the 2008 elections provide strong evidence that American voters support judicial candidates that will exercise judicial restraint by interpreting the law, rather than legislating from the bench. But as we saw in Michigan, the trial bar and supporters of an activist judiciary are both financially and philosophically committed to fighting this battle out state by state, race by race. The trial bar and its allies are not afraid to wage tough, nasty, expensive campaigns to shift the courts in their ideological direction. If the legal reform community wants to hold onto the gains we’ve made and even extend them, we must have that same level of commitment.
The Scruggs Saga (Cont’d)
August 26, 2008
Fortune magazine’s Roger Parloff takes an in-depth look at the campaign by Mississippi tort king Dickie Scruggs to destroy State Farm with a barrage of Hurricane Katrina-related lawsuits and efforts by State Farm to fight back against Scruggs’ underhanded tactics. (Hat tip: Y’All Politics)
“State Farm now alleges that Scruggs manufactured portions of his case against State Farm; induced State Farm insiders to violate their contractural duties; illegally broke into State Farm’s password-protected computer database; tampered with his own witnesses’ or clients’ computers to destroy evidence; compensated witnesses in unethical ways; violated one court’s injunction; and violated another court’s confidentiality orders.”
Scruggs currently resides in federal prison after pleading guilty to bribing a Mississippi judge. Parloff reports that a federal grand jury is now investigating whether Scruggs bribed a second judge. With this new round of alleged illegal activities, the Scruggs Saga promises to continue in Mississippi for years and years.
The Scruggs Playbook
July 31, 2008
Richard “Dickie” Scruggs is by now heading to a federal prison in Kentucky, where he’ll be wearing an orange jumpsuit and doing good works like clearing trash along our nation’s highways. Following his sentence of five years in prison, you’d think the worst is over for the King of Torts.
But Dickie has had a long career . . . and there are those of us who suspect his attempted bribery of a judge is not his first offense, but part of a long pattern of suborning justice.
Case in point—PointofLaw.com posts questions from attorneys for State Farm in their defense in McIntosh v. State Farm, a Scruggs’ inspired Katrina lawsuit. The questions shed light on Scruggs’ litigation strategy, something Scruggs apparently referred to as the “Tobacco Playbook”.
In essence, the questions tell the story of how material was stolen from State Farm’s files, Scruggs would then tell the Mississippi AG to issue a subpoena for the stolen material, State Farm couldn’t produce it (since it’d been stolen), and Scruggs would then be able to tell the press, in the words of State Farm attorneys,
“that [State Farm] was shredding or deep sixing or destroying evidence that you knew they didn’t have; isn’t that a fact?”
Can’t wait to see this movie!
The Pit And The Pendulum
July 3, 2008
For many years, Mississippi was the pit, a dark and hopeless hellhole for physicians and defendants at the mercy of the trial bar.
Then Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove called a special session to bring down medical-malpractice premiums. In 2004, the next governor—Republican Haley Barbour—convened another special session to limit pain-and-suffering awards in medical cases, and to set limits on damages.
The result was a healthy, growing business sector in Mississippi that not even Katrina could knock down. Now, after years of supporting lawsuit reform, the venerable Clarion-Ledger of Jackson is asking if the “tort reform pendulum has swung too far.” They also call into question the state’s “broken judicial election system.”
The editorial was a response to an adjacent piece by a local attorney, Alex Alston, Jr., who claims that 88 percent of all jury verdicts in favor of plaintiffs have been reversed by the state Supreme Court. Frankly, I’m skeptical of Mr. Alston’s factoid - can our readers in Mississippi scrub this factoid for accuracy and context?
In the meantime, let me note that not even Alston supports scrapping judicial elections in Mississippi. Instead, he asks voters to be aware of the issues, to check contributions to judicial candidates on their web sites, and to get involved in the election.
As far as tort reform is concerned, I would respectfully ask that The Clarion-Ledger take a fresh look at their front page. Zach Scruggs was just sentenced to prison in the footsteps of his father, Dickie. The Scruggs’ convictions, however, by no means signal the end of trial lawyer power. Trial Lawyers, Inc. continues circling Mississippi, looking for ways to invalidate these reforms and take us back to the palmy, balmy days of jackpot justice.
Perhaps the pendulum has a ways to go in the direction of reform.
Scruggs Gets 5 years
June 27, 2008
Dickie Scruggs, who gained fame and considerable fortune in the 1990s for his part in suing large corporations for billions, was sentenced today to five years in prison for conspiracy to bribe a judge. Scruggs’ son will be sentenced next week for his role in this family affair.
There are a lot of lessons one could draw from this sorry business, but one of the most important may be the moral hazards involved in putting our courts in the business of redistributing such large sums of money. Whatever else one might say about Scruggs, he knew his way around a courtroom, and he clearly thought $50,000 bribe was enough to gain a favorable ruling in a case with a pay-off of $26.5 million.
The FBI deserves kudos, not only enabling justice to be done in this case, but helping to protect our system of justice as a whole from people consumed by the kind of gargantuan greed we’ve been told only large American corporations can be guilty of. Mississippi’s Sun Herald has an article describing the sentencing here.
The Mississippi Miracle
May 12, 2008
Steve Moore of the WSJ had a terrific piece over the weekend on the nexus between tort reform and economic growth in Mississippi under Governor Haley Barbour.
As Moore points out, prior to Gov. Barbour’s election, Mississippi was hemorrhaging jobs and specializing in lottery-sized jury verdicts. Since enacting common sense legal reforms – including reasonable caps on non-economic damages and abolishing unsavory practices like venue shopping – the state has attracted billions in investment (and jobs) from the likes of Federal Express and Toyota.
Will more states realize the economic price of leaving their legal systems hostage to the trial bar?
A Race To Watch in Mississippi
May 7, 2008
American companies “have no interest in the rights of individuals.” This little bit of anti-business bias – courtesy of a Sid Salter column in the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger – wasn’t spewed by Ralph Nader, Bill Lerach or any other well-known corporate haters. It was uttered by Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz.
The question of whether a blatantly prejudiced judge should be allowed to sit on the state’s highest court is one Mississippi voters will have a chance to decide in the next election. In recent years, Diaz has been indicted (but never convicted) on charges ranging from tax evasion to accepting bribes from wealthy trial lawyers.