More Intellectual Dishonesty (And Callousness) From The Tort Reform Crowd
I've blogged previously about how misleading some of the blog posts on tort reform websites are - how their synopses of cases get it all wrong. This is doubly true when you see a link roundup of cases on one of these websites - one sentence summaries of cases followed by links.
The latest instance of this sort of dishonesty that I've come across was in a Point Of Law roundup post of May 17. The post contains the following precis of a case: "$28 million in punitive damages for bedsore in Sacramento." Really, Point of Law? You're better than that. Or at least you should be.
Having read The Pop Tort's coverage of the nursing home verdict a few days earlier and followed Point of Law's post through to its links, it's obvious that this $28 million dollar punitive award was not for the bedsore: it was for a wrongful death. So far as the news reports tell it, the case concerned a seventy-nine year old woman who fell and fractured her hip in a nursing home operated by a company that had previously been cited for understaffing and patient neglect. The woman then developed an untreated bedsore that became infected and resulted in her death.
Hmmm....so is it $28 million for a bedsore or $28 million for a corporation's killing an elderly woman through its "malicious, fraudulent and oppressive" business practices?
