VOICE OF THE PEOPLE: Justice System Corrects Its Outrages

Chicago-As a personal injury lawyer, I am boiling at the "Big Mac" verdicts and, as expected, the civil justice system corrected such an aberration.

By now, nearly everyone has heard of the 81-year-old Albuquerque woman's success in court against McDonald's from injuries suffered from serving too hot a cup of coffee. The subject has percolated on the pages of newspapers and on the airwaves for weeks. Can Geraldo and Donahue be far behind? The New Mexico jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, less 20 percent for the plaintiff's contributory fault, and $2.7 million in punitive damages. The New Mexico trial judge slashed the punitive award to $480,000, or three times the $160,000 compensatory award.

As a trial lawyer practicing for more than 20 years, even I felt that the original punitive award should not stand.

This is not to say, however, that a need for society to express its outrage at any injustice doesn't exist. The system must allow a jury to communicate its feelings through its verdict- even over too hot a cup of coffee-for to take away that ability would be to allow business to factor in its negligence as a predictable cost.

But when a verdict shocks the conscience, as may rarely occur, the independent discretion of the judiciary can step in to correct such abnormal verdicts. And, by and large, it does.

Surely when a jury becomes hot over the insensitivity or arrogance of a large corporation, it has a right to send a message to its corporate officers. But generally I have seen such courtroom lessons sent when an automaker intentionally fails to correct a known mechanical defect that results in cars exploding in rear-end collisions or when a pharmaceutical company continues to market drugs known to cause serious harm without warning doctors or patients.

More often I have seen the case where a baby, brain damaged at birth by a negligent physician, recovers barely enough to cover medical bills, where an innocent mother killed at the hands of a drunken driver forces the family to go on welfare from a scant recovery, where a father unable to work from a permanent injury on the job forces the mother to work double shifts because a lawsuit is unlikely to pinpoint liability for the faulty old machine.

These cases never make headlines. The McDonald's case, however, is an example of the system gone berserk, if just for a moment.

But studies support the conclusion that the judicial system inevitably corrects what the public deems to be outrageous. Thomas Koenig, a professor of sociology at Northeastern University, found that generally only 11.2 percent of the punitive damages awards are collected after appeal. In many of these cases, no punitive damages were collected at all. For instance, in the celebrated General Motors side-saddle fuel tank pickup case, the $101 million punitive damage verdict was nullified when the verdict was reversed by a Georgia Court of Appeals in June.

Time and again, judges have demonstrated that large punitive damage verdicts that appear to be based on emotion, and not the facts, are just not their cup of tea.