Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘New Jersey’

Update: NJ $1.5M high school basketball verdict overturned

Superior Court Judge Paulette Sapp-Peterson threw out the $1.5M jury verdict Jennifer Besler had obtained against her basketball coach Daniel Hussong and the school district (Mar. 25), saying that Besler had not proven any real damages from the coach’s yelling at her. The $100,000 verdict her father obtained for being gaveled into silence at a school board meeting stands. The Besler family and their attorneys have already promised to appeal. (Linda Stein, “Judge reverses verdict against coach”, Trenton Times, Apr. 9; Lisa Meyer, “Judge nullifies jury?s decision”, Trentonian, Apr. 9; AP, Apr. 9; Scott Frost, “Case opens coaches? eyes”, Trentonian, Apr. 9).

Update: (Linda Stein, “Coach longs for lost reputation”, Trenton Times, Apr. 10).

Update, Apr. 13: (Henry Gottlieb, “Court Bounces Cager’s Claims That Caustic Coach Did Emotional Harm”, New Jersey Law Journal, Apr. 13) (via Bashman).

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$1.5 M for yelling at player to get in shape

In New Jersey, the state that litigates valedictorian decisions (Jun. 30), Jennifer Besler blamed her high school basketball coach’s request for her to lose ten pounds for an eating disorder that has lasted over eight years. A Mercer County jury found her damages to be $3 million, and held the school district responsible for 49% of them–with possible punitive damages still to be calculated. “The jury also awarded Philip Besler, Jennifer’s father, $100,000 because then school board President Lester Bynum gaveled him into silence as he tried to speak at a January 1997 school board meeting.” The defense lawyer has noted that the Besler family’s complaints about the coach began when Jennifer lost her starting position on the team. The school district will appeal, but meanwhile has already shelled out for a four-month trial. (Linda Stein, “$1.5M coach-suit verdict”, Trenton Times, Mar. 25; Lisa Meyer, “Jurors get Hussong case today”, Trentonian, Mar. 16; Lisa Meyer, “Lawyers argue over jury instructions”, Trentonian, Mar. 2). Maybe the former coach can get a job counseling the plaintiffs who blame McDonald’s for their obesity.

Update: Jury declines to award punitive damages; Mr. Besler reveals that he spent $1 million on case (thus showing who the real bully is). (Mark Perkiss, “Coach vows to fight verdict”, Trenton Times, Mar. 26; Lisa Meyer, “Beslers speak after decision”, Trentonian, Mar. 26).

Update: Judge throws out $1.5 M verdict (Apr. 9).

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Nissan headlights

The blue-tinged xenon headlights of the Nissan Maxima have become a popular target for thieves who rip them from a car and sell them on the black market, including 277 incidents in Newark alone. The State of New Jersey, noting the epidemic of thefts in its state, has decided to take action — by suing Nissan. Nissan should have anticipated that its customers would be victimized, says the State, and warned them before they bought the car. (Ronald Smothers, “Nissan Sued Over Theft-Prone Headlights”, NY Times, Mar. 9; Crissa Shoemaker, “Lawsuit: Nissan withheld headlight theft risk”, Courier-News, Mar. 9; Mitch Lipka, “Headlight theft wave spurs state to sue Nissan”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 9). According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, Nissan was a leader in taking steps to prevent headlight thefts, so if this suit has legs, look for copycat lawsuits against other auto manufacturers–and this ludicrous theory of liability could end up being extended to other car parts or even carjackings. (Peter DeMarco, “Left in the dark”, Boston Globe, Feb. 26; Rod Gibson, “Most-stolen cars? It’s debatable”, bankrate.com, Sep. 23, 2003).

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Blockbuster suit: unsafe for adults

“A couple who says their 4-year-old daughter saw hard-core pornography on a PG-rated movie tape from Blockbuster has sued the video company.” The lawsuit, filed in New Jersey, says the rental chain “had a responsibility and a duty to inspect, monitor and ensure the quality and propriety of all video products purchased by its customers.” Blockbuster spokesman Randy Hargrove said “that the company does not carry X- or NC-17-rated movies, and depends on renters to return a tape ‘in the same condition it was given to them.’ ‘Unfortunately there are those rare instances when someone will abuse that privilege and damage one of our tapes,’ he said.” (“Blockbuster sued for porn on PG movie”, AP/CNN, Jan. 24). Reader Jeff Rowes writes: “I haven’t read the complaint, only the CNN story, but the theory of recovery seems to be that Blockbuster has a duty to review every videotape returned after renting to ensure that its contents have not been adulterated with pornography. If adopted, this duty of care would obviously jeopardize Blockbuster’s business because each outlet would need dozens of full time videotape reviewers (or some expensive, as-yet-uninvented technology). It would also create an explosion in fraud as all one would need to recover is a Blockbuster video with a few minutes of porn on it.”

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Updates

More developments in previously covered controversies:

* Where credit is due dept.: lawyers for Patrick Hayashi, whose squabble over ownership of a souvenir Barry Bonds home run baseball grew so costly as to eat up the ball’s auction value, agreed to roll back their fees so that their client would emerge from the case with something of value other than the experience (Gwen Knapp, “Finally, in Bonds ball case, someone shows some class”, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 30)(see Jul. 1).

* National talk show host Joe Scarborough, criticized here among other places for naming a company as “Rat of the Week” without disclosing that his partners at Pensacola’s Levin Papantonio were actively suing it (see Sept. 15), says he’s now stopped receiving a stipend from the law firm, though name partner Fred Levin says Scarborough remains associated with the firm and may even do a commercial for it (Amber Bollman, “Scarborough: No pay from law firm”, Pensacola News Journal, Dec. 30; Howard Kurtz, “Bad News Bearers: Up To No Good?” Washington Post, Dec. 29)(low in piece) (via Lori Patel, Law.com).

* After nearly three weeks of testimony and an hour and a half of deliberations, a jury has rejected a lawsuit against Ford Motor Company over the death of New Jersey state trooper Scott Gonzalez (see Oct. 27, 1999). Gonzalez was killed in a shootout with a mental patient, and lawyers for his widow had alleged that he might have survived had his Ford Crown Victoria been designed so that a crumpled fender did not block his door from opening; they also sued the killer’s parents (who were released from the suit shortly before the recent trial) and Hechler & Koch, the maker of her husband’s police gun, because it briefly jammed after he’d fired seven shots from it; the latter suit resulted in a settlement providing less than $50,000 to Maureen Gonzalez. (Jenna Portnoy, “Jury rules Ford not liable in trooper’s shooting death”, Easton, Pa. Express-Times, Dec. 19)

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Yet more from the publicity file

Your editor was recently quoted in Reason (Brandon Turner, “Citings: Snow Job”, Jan., not online), where he predicted (in an interview conducted this fall) that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Hernandez v. Hughes Missile Systems, the ADA right-to-return-after-drug-misconduct case. (How accurate was this prediction? See Dec. 13). I also contributed a quote this fall when the New York Times took a look at New Jersey’s office charged with cracking down on unethical attorneys, which it’s fair to say has its hands full (John Sullivan, “In New Jersey, Rogue Lawyers Are on the Rise”, New York Times, New Jersey edition, Oct. 19, not online). And the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, covering local attorney Elliot Rothenberg’s challenge to a rule requiring all Minnesota attorneys to enroll in “elimination of bias” classes, mentions this website and our description of the program as “compulsory chapel” (see Nov. 21) (“Attorney challenging state requirement of anti-bias classes for lawyers” Jan. 2).

Back in October, we were quoted by Legal Times’s Jonathan Groner in an interesting piece on a little-publicized crusade by “public interest” lawyers to extend the constitutional right to taxpayer-provided counsel, ushered in with Gideon v. Wainwright for persons facing criminal prosecution, to civil matters such as child custody fights (“On a Crusade for a ‘Civil Gideon'”, Legal Times, Oct. 20). The idea, quietly promoted by the Soros-backed Public Justice Center and by NYU Law’s Brennan Center, is far-reaching and actually quite scary in its implications. See George Liebmann, “‘Civil Gideon’: An idea whose time has passed”, Daily Record, Jul. 18, reprinted at Calvert Institute site. Advocates were hoping to convince the Maryland high court to embrace civil Gideon, in what would have been the first such ruling in the nation, but this month the court dodged the issue in ruling on the case, Frase v. Barnhart. (Ann W. Parks, “Top court sidesteps ‘Civil Gideon’ issue, strikes down custody conditions”, Daily Record, Dec. 12; Jonathan Groner, “Inadmissible — No ‘Civil Gideon’ — for Now”, Legal Times, Dec. 15).

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“Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Seek $107M in Lucent Case Fees”

The amount would be almost one sixth of the $650 million settlement (only $148 million of which is in cash, which Lucent’s insurers put on the table early in the negotiations), working out to about 11 to 15 cents a share for shareholders allegedly injured by alleged securities fraud by Lucent. Another $5 million is set aside to administer the cost of the settlement, and Lucent shareholders surely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars defending the lawsuit, which threatened to put the company into bankruptcy. And you thought that Lucent’s share price dropped from $74 to $3 because of the Internet bubble. (Tim O’Brien, New Jersey Law Journal, Dec. 24).

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Update: N.J. pols plan revenge on docs

New Jersey doctors bet big and lost (see Nov. 4, Nov. 5) hoping that a $2 million investment in this fall’s campaign would lead voters to throw out the trial-lawyer-allied Democrats. And now their intended targets “are doing what winners do here: Gloating, and plotting revenge. … Now, chest-thumping Democrats plan to inflict some pain and suffering payback on the medical profession.” “It’s one of the basic rules of politics: If you’re going to engage in an all-out assault, you’d better make sure you’re going to win,” said Assembly Majority Leader Joe Roberts. “Deep down, [Marlton pediatrician Michael Falk] never believed the legislature would pass caps anyway. Why? Because many lawmakers are lawyers whose campaigns rely heavily on donations from fellow lawyers. But what really raises the doctor’s blood pressure is the suggestion that the MDs should have stayed silent. Since when, he asks, are democratically elected officials in the business of punishing their constituents for exercising their rights?” (Monica Yant Kinney, “Doctors paying price for exercising a right”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 16; Caitlin Gurney, “Campaigning costs state’s doctors”, Nov. 14)(& welcome readers of DynamoBuzz, a weblog about New Jersey politics and other subjects, which says some awfully kind things about us, calling us “one of the hidden gems of the Internet … chock full of information about our legal system run amok”)

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Election results

Tort reformers did well in Mississippi elections, with GOP challenger Haley Barbour toppling incumbent Gov. Ronnie Musgrove (D) and Republican Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck handily fending off a challenge from trial-lawyer-legislator Barbara Blackmon (Julie Goodman and Patrice Sawyer, “Republican challenger unseats Musgrove”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Nov. 5; Andy Kanengiser, “GOP’s Tuck breezes to victory over Blackmon”,
Nov. 5). The Democrats did hold onto the state’s attorney generalship, however. Meanwhile, doctors campaigning for malpractice reform (see Nov. 4) suffered stinging defeats in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Max Baer beat Republican Joan Melvin for a seat on the state supreme court, and New Jersey, where Democratic followers of Gov. Jim McGreevey solidified their hold on the state legislature, in part by outspending their rivals four to one. (“Democrat Baer defeats Melvin for top Pa. court”, AP/Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 5; Tom Turcol, “N.J. Democrats secure control of legislature”, Nov. 5).

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Malpractice key issue in NJ, Pa. races

“In New Jersey, where state-level candidates usually campaign over issues such as property taxes and school funding, the No. 1 issue is now medical malpractice — if political fund-raising totals are any indication.” Doctors are throwing themselves into state politics and are so passionate about the issue that they’re actually outspending trial lawyers by a wide margin. (“Malpractice Issue Draws Most Funding in N.J. State Races”, BestWire/HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), Oct. 28). Pennsylvania physicians are up in arms as well, hoping to make their voices heard in a key state supreme court contest between Republican Joan Orie Melvin and Democrat Max Baer (Carrie Budoff, “This time, physicians are players in election”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 3; Marian Uhlman, “As doctor workforce ages, a fear of shortage”, Oct. 12). In Massachusetts, nearly 1,000 doctors descended on the statehouse last spring attired in white coats, demanding malpractice reform (David Kibbe, “Liability insurance hikes scaring off some doctors”, Ottaway/New Bedford Standard-Times, Oct. 6). See also “Tort-reform law could cure ills of malpractice” (editorial), Rockingham News, Oct. 31 (New Hampshire)(suggesting that recent Texas reforms serve as model).

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