Jury Awards $1.6 Billion (Not Million)

[subgenius]

Damn fine lawyering.

Wonder how the defense lawyer's underwear held up after the verdict was read.

"A Macon County jury awarded a woman one-point-six billion dollars in an insurance fraud lawsuit. The woman, Carolyn Whittaker, claimed she was defrauded by Southwestern Life Insurance Company and its employee, James Richard Perry.

On Wednesday, the jury found that Perry had collected insurance policy payments from Whittaker on a policy that had lapsed in 1996."
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=1633554&nav=0RdDKfGp

Of course with a jury of their obvious intelligence maybe they did get their "M's" and "B's" mixed up. Or their zeroes.

[Suddenly]

Originally posted by subgenius
Damn fine lawyering.

Wonder how the defense lawyer's underwear held up after the verdict was read.

"A Macon County jury awarded a woman one-point-six billion dollars in an insurance fraud lawsuit. The woman, Carolyn Whittaker, claimed she was defrauded by Southwestern Life Insurance Company and its employee, James Richard Perry.

On Wednesday, the jury found that Perry had collected insurance policy payments from Whittaker on a policy that had lapsed in 1996."
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=1633554&nav=0RdDKfGp

Of course with a jury of their obvious intelligence maybe they did get their "M's" and "B's" mixed up. Or their zeroes.

I fear I may rant. Be warned...

I'd rather see criminal prosecution for those responsible for stealing money from this woman than see a huge award of punitive damages, but that almost never happens. The feds are too busy winning the war on drugs and the local boys are both underfunded and outgunned plus would hate to be seen as "unfreindly to business" lest that scare off "outside investment." So, they stick to prosecuting those that can't afford armies of lawyers. Fat cats get a free skate, until some jury gets a good picture of what really goes on and decides to open the only can of whip-a$$ available to the common citizen, the punative award.


The company will get this reduced sharply on appeal, and likely the sides will reach a private settlement, peoples premiums will go up, and the CEO will buy another yacht, and the tort reform goons will have more fodder for their campaign of distortion to aid theft and murder (or at least reckless disregard for life, closer to manslaughter or maybe 2nd degree murder but that doesn't have the same ring) by big business in the name of sustained 10% return on our mutual funds.


All because a few jurors wanted to kick an insurance company in the nads for ripping people off.

Maybe that's a bit strongly worded. Nah. F*ck it.

Ahhh... severe cynicism, washes over me like a warm breeze.

[subgenius]

Suddenly,
I think your post makes excellent and balanced points, and I don't find it cynical.
Isn't even much of a rant, but I do understand you feel strongly about the issues raised by the case.
Be interesting to see how anyone can disagree, but they seem to find a way.

[WildCat]

That article leaves a lot of information out. Was it a simple mistake? Did the company fire the employee responsible? What was the actual $$ involved? Etc. etc.

So I have no opinion given the facts, except that the plaintiff will never collect $800 million from that employee, unless he's one of the original investors in Microsoft.

[Chaos]

Being from the other party involved in that story (insurance), I feel I have to echo Suddenly´s rant. (yes, it´s a rant, but it is justified)

If this was fraud, it is a criminal case.

If she was not paid because of some error of the insurance, she should get her money plus interest. (here in Germany, 4% per year, counting from the date she should have gotten her money)

If she was not paid because of some mistake of hers - well, dumb luck, or rather, just "dumb" - Suezoled and I could tell you a story (or a hundred stories) about "stupid people and their insurance".


Anyway, from my point of view, (and, incidentally, that of all the world´s liability insurance companies) punitive damage is an abomination, as is the tendency of US juries to award money in ridiculous cases.

I won´t comment on the latter, only on punitive damages. I know they are supposed to be (simplifying it) an incentive for companies to be more careful about selling faulty stuff.
They are, however, also an incentive for sueing for absurdly high sums on often minimal causes.
In all of Europe, liability is limited to exactly the value of the destroyed property, repair costs or doctors´ fees. "Damages" as in "compensation for pain, suffering and anguish" is relatively low; you very rarely hear of payments exceeding about 50,000 Euros. And still, the market is not flooded with spoiled food or exploding toasters...

[Zero]

Funny...we trust juries to decide on whether someone should live or die, but most people don't trust juries when it comes to money awards...IMO this is a seriously screwed up set of priorities in this country.

[subgenius]

Originally posted by Zero
Funny...we trust juries to decide on whether someone should live or die, but most people don't trust juries when it comes to money awards...IMO this is a seriously screwed up set of priorities in this country.
Respectfully,
We don't necessarily trust them to make the "correct" decision in criminal cases, we are constitutionally mandated to live with their decisions.
Anecdotal evidence (such as is the subject of this thread) is not evidence that the "system" overall doesn't make the better decision the greater part of the time. We can't expect the "system" to be perfect, as much as it hurts when we are one of the parties who get screwed. Much like the electoral process, it is a method of resolving disputes without violence. As long as most of us continue to have faith in the fairness of the process, we tend to live with an adverse result. And the converse is true.
The "system" is pretty good, the problem is that it is operated by humans who are quite imperfect.

[Suddenly]

Originally posted by Chaos

In all of Europe, liability is limited to exactly the value of the destroyed property, repair costs or doctors´ fees. "Damages" as in "compensation for pain, suffering and anguish" is relatively low; you very rarely hear of payments exceeding about 50,000 Euros. And still, the market is not flooded with spoiled food or exploding toasters...

Europe is a different story in a lot of ways.

Our tort system fills a regulatory and social insurance vaccuum that (I'm told, I could be wrong) just doesn't exist in most of Europe.

I had one professor who was a proponent of instead of giving the cash to the defendant, putting it into a pool to compensate people injured or wronged where there were no funds for compensation. Seemed like a good idea to me, but was usually ridiculed for being socialist.

The system could used reformed in a lot of ways, perhaps towards a European model, but that really only works if you adopt the same European regulations and social protections. Plus, I know that civil suits such as these are different in Europe and wonder if it is as easy for the insurance companies to basically stonewall rather than compensate in Europe as it is here. A lot of the excesses are in response to overreaching in this regard, sharp dealing by insurance companies against clueless injureds not only avoiding sufficient compensation, but sometimes not compensating at all.

We have sort of a "tort lottery," where some get way too much compensation and some get screwed. Lawyers get 1/3 or so either way, but not having an experienced lawyer makes winding up in the "screwed" column a certainty.

I'd welcome a fairer more socialist approach to distributing hidden costs, as would a lot of "injury lawyers" many of whom are flat out socialists. Such a suggestion here is political suicide however.