Jury Awards Can Serve Plaintiffs and Society

“Justice for All Beats a $3-Billion Law Lottery” (Commentary, June 10) was well done but incomplete. It is industry, not plaintiffs, that always opposes bills giving half of the award to the state (or charity). The belief is that juries might look with more favor upon such awards if they went to the state.

The state and the federal government already get half of the large awards from the 39% top federal and 12% top state rate (51%). The original award of $125 million in the Pinto case was the exact amount of money Ford saved by not making an $11 fix on the Pinto gas tank. The award seemed huge but it was really quite fair.

You either trust democracy (read “jurors”) or work to destroy it. If judges showed more respect for such “large” awards, the Pinto gas tanks, for one, would have been fixed and cigarettes would vanish. The court reduction in the Pinto case to $3.5 million was widely perceived as wise judicial restraint when it was actually a slap in the face to an already wise jury. I suspect that if the jurors were interviewed in the cigarette verdict, the “huge” award would make more sense than it at first appears.

Herbert Hafif

Attorney, Claremont