In this paper, I will address how the Hot Coffee documentary altered and/or confirmed my previously held perception of the various aspects of the legal system. The first exhibit which is titled The Public Relations Campaign, is about the infamous poster child of tort reform and the war against frivolous lawsuit – Stella Liebeck vs. McDonald’s. Prior to doing this assignment my pre-established opinion regarding the tort reform was that, as much as large corporations and businesses like to view it as a reasonable defense mechanism to protect themselves from being preyed upon by frivolous plaintiffs, it is largely anti-consumer oriented. And this opinion of mine was only reinforced after I finished watching the documentary.
Tort reform is anti-consumer because it dramatically caps or limits the amount of economic and non-economic damage rewards that can be awarded by the jury. Lisa Gourley was a victim of medical malpractice; she was pregnant with twins; one of the twins was receiving insufficient oxygen in the womb and the doctors in addition to failing to diagnose this issue also failed to perform a c-section in time. As a result of her doctor’s negligence that twin was born with very serious mental and physical disabilities. Initially, the jury awarded her $5.6 million, but due to the cap, she only ended up receiving $1.7 million. This amount was nowhere near enough to compensate her son for his medical cost for the rest of his life. Which further proves my point in regard to the tort reform; all it does is create this illusion that businesses, doctors, and insurance companies need protection from mobs of litigious citizens. Proponents of tort reform spin it as if frivolous lawsuits and runaway juries are endemic in our society. When in reality, cases where the jury intending to make a point against large corporations or misguided medical malpractices rewards the plaintiffs millions of dollars are very few and far between. For every case like Lisa’s or the McDonald’s case, there are numerous other cases where an injured plaintiff does not receive the fair compensation that he or she is entitled to because of how the tort reform unjustly tilts the legal landscape against them and shields the wrongdoers from paying for their mistakes.
After watching this documentary, I have also come to realize or learned that there are actually two components of the tort reform instead of just one. The first being the result, which makes the tort reform anti-consumer as I addressed above. And the second part is its disposition/nature; that is anti-democratic. Anti-democratic in the way in which it was imposed upon the citizens of this country. After President Clinton vetoed the tort reform bill, the businesses then took it to the state level, where the state supreme court seats and political races were funded by the Chambers of Commerce and Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA). PR associations like CALA, were disguised to seem like groups of concerned community leaders and grassroots citizens. Whereas, these were actually lobbying companies that were part of a carefully orchestrated campaign being manipulated from DC. Case in point being the story of the former justice of the Mississippi supreme court; Oliver Diaz. Whose re-election campaign was targeted by Karl Rove who opposed Diaz due to his history of voting in favor of ordinary citizens and against corporations in tort cases. And in spite of his prosecution for improper conduct on the bench and subsequent acquittal after winning that election, the Chamber of Commerce continued to funnel in funds and resources against Diaz and it eventually paid off when he lost the 2008 re-election. Never before did I realize that there was such a direct link between the corporations or the lobbyists and the passage of tort reform bills in the various states.
Thus, these so-called tort-reformers essentially utilized their deeply embedded influence within our legal system to not only empower their own dutiful followers in other branches of the government. But they also undermined the ability of the jury to dispense justice by restricting its authority to determine the equitable compensation that should be awarded to the plaintiffs. In essence, the tort reform is depriving these citizens of the limited opportunities they have to effectively and adequately participate in our civil justice system. And I would have remained entirely oblivious to this fact if it were not for this documentary.
