I frequently find myself stunned by the large awards that juries seem to routinely give out to people for punitive damages. These all too often seem to be about rewarding people for being idiots. The perfect example is those people who were shocked, shocked and appalled, to discover that the cigarettes they started smoking in the last twenty years caused health problems.
But sometimes the astronomical sums sound reasonable. Today, a jury awarded a woman $2.2 billion in a lawsuit she brought against a pharmacist who admitted to watering down the woman's chemotherapy drugs. The pharmacist said he did so because he was short on money. The CNN article says that Federal authorities believe the scheme may have afffected as many as 4,200 patients.
I am hard pressed to imagine of a money-skimming scheme more perverse than this. I am aghast at the evil that some people are capable of.
Posted by Mike at October 10, 2002 08:44 PMYeah, I saw this article too. While I agree that that's one of the more immoral ways to make a buck that I've ever heard of, $2.2B sounds a bit excessive, particularly since a lot of other patients are affected and the guy doesn't have that much money. I guess it's a little bit like sentencing to 500 years or 4 consecutive life sentences or whatever. Maybe as a warning to pharmaceutical companies who do have billions of dollars worth of deep pockets not to try something similar?
I'm fine with this guy losing everything he has; I just don't like the idea that one victim is going to get it all, or the three-order-of-magnitude discrepancy between what "the jury awarded" and what the victim could conceivably receive.
Posted by: russell on October 11, 2002 04:53 PM