"Tort Reform," Lone Star style

Great article from the Institute for Southern Studies re: effects of tort reform in Texas as enacted by Bush. Too much good stuff for snippage to do it justice. The three paras below come from the first page and a half.

http://www.southernstudies.org/reports/LoneStarTortReform.pdf

From the article:

"On June 23, 1999, 24-year-old Juan Martinez and his uncle Jose Inez Rangel were hydro-testing a pipe at the Phillips Chemical plant in Pasadena, Texas. The pipe was about 10 feet from a reactor that manufactured plastic used in drinking cups, food containers, and medical equipment. At a crucial moment, plant operators opened the valves in the reactor out of sequence, sending an excess of a volatile chemical into the reactor, where it mixed with a catalyst to create a vapor cloud—and a fiery explosion. The blast coated Martinez and Rangel with 500-degree molten plastic. They were burned alive.

Martinez and Rangel were not the first workers to die at the Phillips plant. All told, 30 workers had been killed and hundreds severely wounded at the plant in the previous 11 years. The worst of the accidents happened in 1989, when an explosion killed 23 people at the plant. The chemical company paid out $40 million to compensate for the death of one of the victims."

<snip>

"The jury, which was not told about the damage cap during the trial, found Phillips had been negligent and acted with malice in Martinez’s death. It awarded his widow, daughter, and parents $7.8 million in actual damages and $110 million in punitive damages—the equivalent of one month’s profits for the company. But state law would reduce the punitive damages to $3.2 million, making the entire award a fraction of one percent of Phillips’s annual profits."

Mostly

Everybody who witnessed the outcome was shocked--they didn't realize the company would get off so easily. The reason for lawsuits like this was not to repay a family for the loss of a breadwinner. It was to make it too expensive for a company to let more people die. Let the company shell out some bucks to fix the problem. Now, they needn't bother.

Until they need the protection that was taken away by tort reform.

There's a great section in the article about a pro-Bush, pro-tort reform guy whose company got screwed by a larger, more powerful competitor. He sued and won but the award was so small it didn't punish the other company, nor was it enough for him to keep his company afloat.

Awww, poor widdle Wepublican, he leared his lesson the hard way, getting screwed with his pants on.

This jibes with what I've always thought about conservatives: they lack the foresight to care/fight for anything that doesn't affect them right this very minute.

Mostly