VOICE OF THE PEOPLE: Railroads Indifferent Despite Verdict

WILMETTE—The Tribune got one thing right. "No one of sound body would trade places with Rachel Barton, would accept the loss of one leg and the disfigurement of another for the $29.6 million judgment she received from a jury" ("Barton verdict makes no sense," Editorial, March 3). Yet the newspaper's editorial board decided that $8.8 million would certainly be a more fair figure.

Where does that figure come from? Not the jury, the 12 people selected by both sides as her peers from the community who took an oath to be fair and impartial and determine an amount, if any, for Rachel based upon the evidence and testimony presented at trial. That $8.8 million figure is dictated by the Illinois Civil Justice League, a group of selfish corporate interests who attempt to cap damages for those most catastrophically injured by negligent defendants. All in the name of saving insurance premiums.

And under the law that was written by special-interest groups and passed by the Illinois General Assembly in 1995, no matter what the jury would have found for Rachel, the judge would automatically have to reduce the award to $3.3 million. Given her past medical bills and what even the defense agreed would be her future medical expenses, that would not be sufficient to cover even that.

The jury found Rachel 4.5 percent at fault. The remaining 95.5 percent blame was attributed to the negligent conduct of Metra and the Chicago & North Western railroad (now the Union Pacific) who, instead of figuring out how to pay the verdict, are meeting in closed-door sessions with the leaders of the Illinois Civil Justice League as to how to turn Rachel Barton into a "poster child" for their cause.

It's not surprising. For at least five years prior to the Rachel Barton incident, some 14 incidents involving people caught in their train doors and dragged were reported to Metra, but the culture of indifference apparent at the railroad resulted in nothing being done about it. The jury heard these facts.

Is commuter travel as safe today as it was on Jan. 16, 1995, when Rachel Barton was dragged 386 feet along the railroad right of way? I can tell you this now, although the jury was not allowed to hear it. Two weeks after her tragic event, Metra changed its door-closing policy where the conductor in charge closes all train doors but his own, then steps off the train and takes one last look up and down the platform and then closes his own door. Even the conductor on Rachel's train testified at trial that the second-look system would have helped her, perhaps even would have prevented the accident.

But the railroads wouldn't be expected to be talking about that now. They find it more compelling to fabricate stories—and they are fabricated—about fare increases to pay this verdict, a fully insured verdict by their insurer, Associated Insurance Group.

As for the "obscene figure" of nearly $600 million in punitive damages, I never asked the jury for anything close to $600 million. The courts require a "reasonable relationship" between the compensatory award and punitive damages. I advised the jurors that, should they decide to award punitive damages at all, they should consider a multiple of their compensatory award from zero to eight. Other courts have upheld awards in the range of four to 12 times the compensatory damages, and I simply chose a figure in the middle. From that the media extrapolated a $600 million headline.

For a responsible newspaper like the Tribune to say that the verdict "makes no sense"—if the editors had sat at the Rachel Barton trial for four weeks and deliberated for 17 hours as the jurors did, only to have a cap system in place reduce it automatically to $3.3 million, I wonder if their editorial would have read much differently.