Cyrus Dugger

The Irony of Tort “Reform” - The Inevitable Personal Problem

Interesting story which highlights how easy it is to support anti-civil justice reforms in the abstract, until they affect you or yours personally.

Turnabout for the speaker? By Tom Crawford, Capitol Impact

The Marietta Daily Journal reported recently that House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) will represent the mother of Tara Drummond, a police recruit who was accidentally shot and killed during a training course last year, in a lawsuit being filed against Cobb County in which Drummond’s mother will seek $5 million in damages.
Richardson’s involvement is not especially surprisin, since he is an attorney and Tara Drummond worked for his law firm for several years before she decided to become a police officer.

The fact that Richardson will try to win $5 million in damages from the civil lawsuit is ironic, however, when you consider his actions last year as the House of Representatives was debating legislation that radically revised the way civil lawsuits are filed and tried in Georgia’s court system.

Richardson and the House leadership insisted that the tort reform bill contain a $350,000 limit on non-economic (“pain and suffering”) damages that result from medical malpractice or similar negligent acts, even though several

Republican lawyers objected that the cap was unfairly low.

The damages Richardson will be asking for in the Drummond lawsuit, of course, will far exceed the $350,000 limit on damages that the tort reform law imposed on medical malpractice suits.

“Clearly, the speaker recognizes that the loss of a family member should be compensated at a level higher than the $350,000 cap on damages that the legislature approved in 2005,” said Allison Wall of the consumer group Georgia Watch, a critic of the tort reform law.

“It is our hope that the legislature recognizes that the pain for loss is not just limited to family members of shooting victims, and will consider enacting exceptions to the cap for medical malpractice victims,” Wall said.

“Since this is a pending legal case, the speaker is unable to comment,” said Richardson’s spokesperson, Michelle Hitt Grasso, when questioned about the Drummond lawsuit. “As far as the caps on damages, those caps apply to ‘pain and suffering’ damages not ‘economic loss’ damages - there is a huge difference.”

It will be interesting to see the amount of non-economic damages the jury awards - before the cap voids their decision and reduces it to $350,000.

I will try and follow the case.

If you or your organization is interested in learning more about or working on these types of civil justice issues, please contact cdugger@drummajorinstitute.org.

Posted at 8:40 PM, Sep 21, 2006 in Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)