Tobacco Witnesses Were Told To Ease Up

Justice Dept. Sought Softened Sanctions

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 9, 2005; Page A04

Government lawyers asked two of their own witnesses to soften recommendations about sanctions that should be imposed on the tobacco industry if it lost a landmark civil racketeering case, one of the witnesses and sources familiar with the case said yesterday.

Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the Justice Department's lead trial lawyer called him May 9 to say her superiors wanted him to scale back the recommendations he had made in written testimony. They sought to remove his suggestions for a ban on tobacco company methods of marketing to young people before Myers took the stand. Myers said he refused to do so.

A second witness, scientific expert Michael Eriksen, also departed from recommendations in his earlier written testimony, court documents show. Eriksen declined to comment, but four separate sources familiar with the case said Justice Department lawyers had asked him to do so.

The two men were called by the government as part of its lawsuit, which contends that the nation's largest tobacco companies engaged in a 50-year conspiracy to defraud the public about the dangers and addictiveness of smoking.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/08/AR2005060802472.html

n/t

illegal?

Thanks for supporting the culture of life, Bushco.

I heard a little about this earlier today from someone directly involved in the case. The Bush admin. has never wanted this trial, it looks like they found a way to help the tobacco industry.

I hope this blows up in Bush's face. This is tampering with witnesses. A lot of good people put a lot of time into this trial and now Bush wants to snatch defeat from the jawa of victory - to pay off his tobacco industry sponsors.

in closing arguments, that prosecutors lowered their request for damages to 8% of what they sought at beginning of trial (92% discount!)
:patriot:

Wouldn't be much more obvious than this!

But it still stinks to high heaven. This is a civil case, not a criminal case, so it's not as if the government lawyers were leaning on eyewitnesses to a crime to claim they'd seen something they hadn't or vice versa. Lawyers in a complex civil case will coordinate the testimony of their expert witnesses to present a stronger argument, and an expert whose testimony is out of line with other expert testimony (say, in his analysis of a decedent's lost earnings) may be led to a different number to be more in agreement with other economists that are called to testify.

But for the government to work over its own witnesses to depart from their earlier written testimony is unheard of. First, it hurts the expert's credibility: "Mr. Eriksen, you have testified today that X. Yet in your written submission from February, you testified Y. You're just guessing, aren't you?"

Second, it hurts the government's case, and the reasons for that aren't clear, though we all have our suspicions. Presumably the case was brought to force the tobacco companies to pay some of the social costs for their addictive, lethal industry and its 50 year campaign to deceive the public and keep smokers smoking, to their greatly increased profit. Knocking their liability down by more than 90% is hardly a tactic calculated to punish the tobacco companies.

However it IS consonant with the Bush administration's commitment to profits over people, and corporations over individuals.

I know more about this now.

The gov't didn't "work over their own (expert) witness", they just ignored his recommendations for the amount of money it would take to
do the social programs that were part of the settlement.

It doesn't really hurt the govt's case - it may in fact help it, since the interference from the top end of the DOJ (and we know where that's coming from) is so obvious.

The judge was highly suspicious of why the Justice Dept. would do this, and certainly made it known that she suspected pressure from outside influences on the Justice Dept.



The judge has the ability to ignore the DOJ recommendations and from what I understand has, so far, been an untainted arbiter of the case.
We'll know better 6 months from now.