Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [104]
Suing a big company like Ford is never easy. They retain the best legal counsel and hire the best expert witnesses. They bury the judge in motions. That’s their job. But Ford’s last-minute motion for continuance—to delay the trial—when a kid was gasping for life on a ventilator was more than district court judge Donald Ross could accept. Ross, now on the state appeals court bench, denied Ford’s motion and told the attorneys to get ready to pick a jury.
Then there was another eleventh-hour delay.
Willie Searcy’s biological father, a convict in a Texas prison, decided to join the case and filed a motion to intervene in his son’s trial. To Willie’s lawyers, his father’s involvement didn’t pass the smell test.* How did a man serving time in a Texas prison come up with the idea that he should join a case his ex-wife was filing on behalf of their son? Ford claimed they had nothing to do with it but wanted the father to join the case because they didn’t want to face another lawsuit when he got out of prison. Willie’s lawyers traveled to the prison where Franklin Knight was incarcerated to check out the story told by Ford’s lawyers—that they had nothing to do with Knight’s attempt to join the case. The prison keeps a visitor’s log. One of Knight’s visitors on the eve of his decision to intervene in the case was Margaret Keliher, a member of Ford’s defense team who was later elected Dallas County judge. When he was told that his intervention would slow a court case that could mean life and death for his son, Knight withdrew from the suit.
The jury needed less than four hours to reach a verdict at the end of a four-week trial in the Rusk County Courthouse. Willie’s
attorney, Jack Ayres, had opened his argument with a $27 million estimate of lifetime health-care costs for Willie. The jury found Ford liable and awarded Willie Searcy $30 million in actual damages. On the following day it took the jurors ninety-three minutes to assess $10 million in punitive damages against Ford.
Ford appealed and the case bogged down in an odd fight over which of two appeals courts would hear the case. A year later the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the Texarkana court of appeals had authority. “It was horrible,” said Ayres. “We were trying to save this kid’s life. And we lost a year.” The appeals court in Texarkana upheld the $30 million in actual damages but overturned the $10 million punitive-damage award. Ford appealed again. Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, would have to wait for the Texas Supreme Court to hear the case.
Each party filed its briefs and listed the points of error it wanted the justices to consider. Each party prepared for oral arguments before the nine justices in a courtroom in an unremarkable building behind the Texas Capitol. Ford hired Baker Botts to handle the appeal. That’s Baker as in the old family firm of James Baker III: Ronald Reagan’s Treasury secretary, Poppy Bush’s secretary of state, and director of the legal and public relations campaign that got George Bush out of the 2000 Florida recount and into the White House. At the counsel’s table with the boys from Baker Botts was a former Texas Supreme Court justice, and William Powers, dean of the University of Texas Law School. (Powers later accepted an assignment from Enron to investigate the company’s collapse, even though Enron was a major donor to the law school.) Enron also had an equity position in the Texas Supreme Court. Ken Lay and Co. had invested $134,558 in the campaigns of the nine justices on the bench since Owen won her first election in 1994. Owen herself got $7,000 even though she had no opponent. She also got $24,450 from Baker Botts.