Legal Urban Legends Hold Sway - Los Angeles Times
The LA Times gets it right on it’s article Legal Urban Legends Hold Sway
Merv Grazinski set his Winnebago on cruise control, slid away from the wheel and went back to fix a cup of coffee.
You can guess what happened next: The rudderless, driverless Winnebago crashed.
Grazinski blamed the manufacturer for not warning against such a maneuver in the owner's manual. He sued and won $1.75 million.
His jackpot would seem to erase any doubt that the legal system has lost its mind. Indeed, the Grazinski case has been cited often as evidence of the need to limit lawsuits and jury awards.
There's just one problem: The story is a complete fabrication.
The story talks about the fictional Stella Awards that makes the rounds of the internet of outrageous lawsuits. All of the stories are made up and completely false. Whenever I receive one of these, I do a ‘Reply to All’ and send them information on how these stories are fake. If you want to show that the legal system needs improving (and what in life doesn’t need improvement), you don’t start off with lies. Congratulations to the Los Angeles Times for getting it right.
Of course, just because they are a complete and total fabrication, doesn’t mean that the stories aren’t poisoning our jury pools.
One of the biggest problems these days is the poisoning of jury pools by the media. Which means the general public, whether it is regarding "frivolous" lawsuits, or the idea that all pharmaceutical companies are deliberately trying to hurt the consumer resulting in huge awards in a suit. Of course both those things can and have happened, their are frivolous suits and some companies have deliberately hidden life saving information to protect their bottom line. However when the media or anyone promotes these views with false and/or biased stories, including criminal cases the bottom line is that justice becomes harder to reach for all.
Kudos to the paper for getting it right this time.
As a criminal lawyer I must say picking a fair jury is not an easy task. The contamination of the pool by the media is a serious problem, I think greater use of gag orders in these cases may be helpful.
Your right, I have yet to see anyone prosecuted for giving false information during jury selection. This is probably the most important step in the process yet most pepole are not truthful 100 percent.
