Cases of bad judgment Fri Jun 15, 7:22 AM ET
Taken to the cleaners.
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Will somebody please get Roy Pearson a new pair of pants - and some sense of proportion?
For those who've somehow missed the international headlines, the blogs and the morning talk shows, Pearson is the Washington, D.C., administrative law judge who sued his dry cleaner for $65 million for losing his pants. (Yes, you read that correctly: $65 million and lost pants.) Pearson has since slashed his claim to a mere $54 million.
Pearson dragged the establishment's Korean immigrant owners into court, claiming that they violated the city's consumer fraud law by failing to make good on a "satisfaction guaranteed" pledge. This week, two years after the incident, the case went to trial, and a ruling is expected soon. Pearson's rambling, emotional testimony included his description of one traumatic moment - when the cleaners allegedly tried to pass off some other pants as his - as a "Twilight Zone experience."
At one level, the case is just an oddity - a particularly extreme example of the many ludicrous claims filed every year. They are inevitable because anyone is entitled to go to court, and should be. But the handling of the case points to broader problems. For starters, why didn't a judge shut this down sooner? Pearson could have been dispatched to small claims court. Part of a judge's job is to weed out meritless claims.
Moreover, how does someone who would file such a claim end up as an administrative judge, deciding cases that affect other people's lives? Pearson was serving a two-year term, which ended last month, and he's up for reappointment. Meanwhile, he continues to pull down $100,512 a year on the public payroll as an attorney adviser.
Aren't judges supposed to have, well, some sense of judgment?
And where does Pearson shop anyway? Someone should tell him you can buy a really nice pair of pants for less than $54 million.
Shoe on other foot.
Compared with Pearson's $54 million suit, Robert Bork's decision to sue the Yale Club for $1 million is small potatoes. And the facts of the case - Bork fell while trying to get onto a dais that had neither a step nor a railing - are unremarkable.
Unremarkable, that is, except that Bork, 80, is one of the nation's leading conservative legal scholars and has occasionally taken aim at the type of tort he is now bringing. To wit, in a 1995 op-ed piece that he co-authored, the former appellate judge and Supreme Court nominee argued that the constant threat of personal injury lawsuits makes America's civil justice system "expensive, capricious, unpredictable."
Bork managed to deliver his scheduled Yale Club speech despite the injury. But he later underwent surgery. In his complaint, he blames the club for "pain and suffering, a continuing leg injury, medical bills and related costs of treatment, and lost work time and income." The amount of his claim, and the fact that he is asking for unspecified punitive damages, has prompted a number of Bork's critics to cry hypocrisy.
Well, maybe. But the pain of personal experience also has a way of overriding opinions formed from detached study or ideological rigidity. Or perhaps the great social theorist Cyndi Lauper had it right: Money changes everything.
Letter of the law.
From less rarefied legal circles comes this story: In 2003, Genarlow Wilson, 17, attended a New Year's Eve party involving alcohol and marijuana. There, he received oral sex from a 15-year-old girl, all videotaped by a fellow partygoer. Police saw the tape, and Wilson was arrested.
Although the sex was consensual, Georgia law at the time deemed it to be aggravated child molestation, which carried a mandatory 10-year sentence. Lawmakers might not have had consenting teens in mind when they wrote that law, but Wilson was convicted and got the 10-year sentence.
Now 21, Wilson has served 28 months. During his incarceration, Georgia lawmakers downgraded the offense he committed to a misdemeanor, but it wasn't retroactive.
Does keeping Genarlow Wilson in prison amount to reasonable justice? Not according to Georgia Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson (no relation), who earlier this week called the case a "grave miscarriage of justice" and ordered Wilson released.
End of story? Not quite. Georgia's by-the-book attorney general, Thurbert Baker, filed a notice of appeal, saying the judge had exceeded his authority and set a bad precedent. Wilson is still in prison.
The best that can be said for the Wilson case is that the state has a legitimate interest in keeping older teens from preying on younger ones - if that even happened. But it's a weak argument.
Georgia, like every other state, has no shortage of serious crime. And, like every other state, it has a limited number of prosecutors, prison cells and other resources that make a criminal justice system work.
Aren't there other cases more worthy of the attorney general's attention? And, regardless, is prison really the right remedy for consensual teenage sex?
Justice demands judgment, not rigidity. That's true whether the issue is teen sex, an unfortunate fall or a $54 million pair of pants.
Link
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070615/cm_usatoday/casesofbadjudgment;_ylt=AnSOoL10KqstO_YrP6l80fr9wxIF
