Earl
Guest
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 Posted:
Sat Jul 02, 2005 8:03 am Post subject:
An honest judge -- shocking!! |
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Something I never thought I would see, a federal judge actually
rejecting a legal scam case.
(O'Quinn is a well know ambulance chaser in Houston, with a
national practice. He even robs his partners)
*******
Federal judge throws out thousands of silica diagnoses
Houston law firm sanctioned in case
Associated Press
CORPUS CHRISTI — A federal judge has recommended throwing out
all but one of about 10,000 diagnoses of the lung ailment
silicosis that were used in lawsuits against industrial
companies, ruling that doctors "manufactured" findings of the
disease in hundreds of cases.
U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack's scathing 249-page
opinion, signed Thursday, finds that the diagnoses are
inadmissible in court. The bulk of the cases originate in
Mississippi, and Jack sent them back to the state courts along
with her report. She threw out the approximately 100 Texas cases
that she felt she had jurisdiction over.
Jack's ruling also orders sanctions against Houston law firm
O'Quinn, Laminack & Pirtle, which brought roughly 2,000 of the
suits. Lawyers from the firm did not immediately return a call
for comment today.
A doctor testifying before Jack in December withdrew thousands
of his diagnoses, saying he only briefly scanned X-rays to give
what he thought was a second opinion on the degenerative
diseases caused by inhaling quartz dust.
His withdrawal, made during consolidated pretrial proceedings
for lawsuits from several states, prompted Jack to order every
doctor and "screening company" to back up the diagnoses in the
lawsuits. More doctors withdrew their diagnoses, and after
hearings in February Jack said she sensed "red flags of fraud"
in the way plaintiffs were recruited.
"These diagnoses were driven by neither health nor justice,"
Jack wrote in her opinion Thursday. "They were manufactured for
money."
Danny Mulholland, a Mississippi-based defense attorney for
Ingersoll-Rand Co. and other companies, said the opinion was
"historic" in an age where law firms recruit plaintiffs with
billboards and television ads.
"I think the way litigation has been done, and particularly mass
tort litigation, changed with the February hearings which
culminated in this order," he said. "We'll have to go back in
state court and win there, but we expect to, based on what Judge
Jack has found."
*******
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