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It’s hard to find better legal counsel than the team Ford put together, yet in the points of error Ford’s lawyers raised, little attention was paid to venue. It was a question that would later occur to Justice Owen.

By 1996, more than three years had passed since Willie Searcy slammed into the dashboard of his mother’s pickup. His attorney, Jack Ayres, begged the justices to act as quickly as possible. “We filed a motion to expedite,” Ayres said. “We may not have had a right to that preference under the rules of law, but we wanted them to consider the child’s condition.”

Ford joined Willie’s lawyers in the request to expedite.

The court took the motion into consideration.

Two years later Priscilla Owen wrote the court’s opinion.

The court decided that the venue was improper—that Willie’s attorneys had filed in the wrong court. The whole case would have to be retried—in Dallas. Searcy’s family and lawyers were stunned. The supreme court had given the defense team something it hadn’t even asked for. Under the “writ of error” system in the Texas appeals process, the supreme court tells lawyers what points of error the court will consider. Nowhere had the court mentioned venue. Yet that’s what Priscilla Owen gave Ford. And more.

Owen wrote a long opinion, steeped in legal history and precedent, laying out the court’s venue argument. It’s the sort of opinion justices prepare when they want to build on precedent and define law for future litigants. But it was completely moot. In the years the case had languished in court, Governor George W. Bush had pushed the Legislature to pass a new venue law that is much more restrictive to injured parties suing corporations. The law Owen elaborated upon no longer existed.

“Why write a historical, precedent-setting opinion on a Texas law when it is moot?” asked an attorney who had watched the case. Another justice on the court, also a Bush appointee to a vacant seat, answered that question in her dissent: Justice Owen was trying to preordain the outcome of the case.

George W. Bush was preparing to run for governor of Texas when Willie Searcy lost the use of his limbs in April 1993. Bush was president of the United States when Willie Searcy finally got as close to justice as the Texas courts would ever allow him. After Justice Owen sent the skinny kid and his lawsuit to a district court in Dallas, the judge immediately granted Ford’s motion to dismiss. The Dallas appeals court didn’t have the stomach to uphold that decision. On June 29, 2001, it reversed the judge’s decision and wrote an opinion that almost guaranteed Willie’s family the tens of millions needed to care for him.

Finally Susan Miles would get the money she’d asked for to pay for full-time nursing care and a better ventilator for her son. Too late. Four days after the appeals-court ruling, Willie Searcy died at home in bed sometime between four and five in the morning. Susan Miles has a pretty good fix on the hour of her son’s death. Unable to hire full-time care because she was waiting for the judgment the court had awarded her, Susan Miles had patched together a complicated schedule of practical nurses and caregivers covered by Medicaid, supplemented by neighbors. On this particular July morning, one of the patches gave way. The attendant Susan paid to sit with Willie left at four. She had been doing routine work on the young man’s ventilator when her cell phone rang and her shift ended. When Susan walked in at five, the ventilator was not working.

While they had struggled to keep Willie alive, Susan and Ken Miles’ marriage also failed—or collapsed under the pressure of eight years balancing litigation and nursing care. Baker Botts got a million-dollar contingency fee for reversing the first decision. Their general counsel had told Willie’s attorney he would never get a dime out of Ford, that if Willie’s lawyers couldn’t come up with a settlement offer Ford found acceptable, they would string the case out until the boy died. After he did, a Dallas probate court awarded Willie Searcy’s estate $5,635,000. Ford is preparing