First, an important credit: The Philadelphia Inquirer has devoted a half-dozen stories to the plight of Barbara Mancini. All the facts described in this post come from their reports.

Joseph Yourshaw, 93 years old and a World War II veteran who had served in the Battle of the Bulge, was in home-hospice dying from kidney failure, end-stage diabetes, and heart disease, with additional complications from a stroke and pain from arthritis. Barbara Mancini was a nurse in Philadelphia and, it seems, quite a good daughter, as she had made the 2-hour trek up to Pottsville in Schuykill County to be bedside with him and to help him with his medications. He was in severe pain, as usual, and he had a prescription for morphine. She asked the hospice nurse for a bottle of morphine; it’s apparently disputed whether she asked for a second one after already giving him one, or whether she asked for a second one because the first hadn’t arrived yet and Yourshaw was in pain.

And that’s when the nightmare started. The hospice nurse called 911, and reported the following:

The nurse “told me that her client had taken an overdose of his morphine with the intent to commit suicide,” [police officer] Durkin wrote in his report.

The nurse said Mancini, who also is a nurse, gave her father the morphine “at his request so that he could end his own suffering,” Durkin wrote.

Before getting to the prosecution, let’s start with the factual predicate. If everything the nurse said was true — thus far, as is typical when there is a criminal prosecution, Mancini has not given her side of the story publicly — then so what? Pennsylvania law allows a person to voluntarily die by way of suspending medical care, food, water, ventilation, and so on and so forth; the state even has a website set up so people can correctly set up their advance directives for health care paperwork. If we allow someone to literally starve himself to death rather than continue living with a terminal illness, why don’t we allow him to simply increase the dosage of the pain medication he’s already taking?

Indeed, the United States Supreme Court has already said it’s okay for States to allow patients to request life-threatening levels of palliative medication:

Just as a State may prohibit assisting suicide while permitting patients to refuse unwanted lifesaving treatment, it may permit palliative care related to that refusal, which may have the foreseen but unintended “double effect” of hastening the patient’s death. See New York Task Force, When Death is Sought, supra n. 6, at 163 (“It is widely recognized that the provision of pain medication is ethically and professionally acceptable even when the treatment may hasten the patient’s death, if the medication is intended to alleviate pain and severe discomfort, not to cause death”).

Vacco v. Quill, 521 U.S. 793, 807, Fn 11 (1997). But, just because something is “ethically and professionally acceptable” doesn’t mean it’s lawful in Pennsylvania, and our Commonwealth still has the absurd notion that what allegedly happened to Mr. Yourshaw was a terrible crime.
Continue Reading Barbara Mancini, Allegedly Guilty Of Mercy For Her Father

It’s October, which means the Supreme Court is back in session, ready to continue its pro-big-business charge. It also means it’s time for me to get back to a recurring theme on my blog: if past sessions are any indication, then no matter what the Supreme Court decides this year, it’s likely that it won’t have a clue what it’s talking about, and its opinions will be littered with dubious factual conclusions.

This problem seems to be getting worse in the era of the Roberts Court, which has taken judicial activism to a new level. Back in 2009, I recommended the Supreme Court circulate draft opinions publicly — the same way that bills are proposed in Congress and regulatory changes are proposed in agencies — before making them the law of the land. In February 2012, Alli Orr Larsen wrote about “Confronting Supreme Court Fact Finding,” perhaps by way of an agency analogous to the Congressional Research Service, which I discussed here.

But it’s important we recognize that the problem of Supreme Court “fact finding” isn’t just a matter of the Court not understanding cable television markets or how plaintiff’s lawyers are compensated differently from defense lawyers. The Supreme Court’s factual misunderstandings intrude very deeply into some of the Court’s core doctrine.

Take, for example, qualified immunity in civil rights lawsuits. It would make sense if people could sue State governments to recover damages when their constitutional rights are violated — like when police officers literally break someone’s face for back talking — but the Supreme Court has erected tall barriers against such relief. It’s not enough to prove constitutional rights were violated; the plaintiff also has to jump through a variety of hoops, such as suing the police officer individually, rather than the municipality or county, for the violation, and then they have to show that their right was “clearly established” and that the violation “shocks the judicial conscience,” which is so ambiguous that it’s really just code for giving federal judges a way to get rid of civil rights lawsuits they don’t think should succeed. 
Continue Reading The Depth Of The Supreme Court’s Factual Misunderstandings

I suppose it’s unsurprising that criminal defense lawyers and plaintiff’s lawyers would all have concerns about the use of Tasers — the Taser victims and their family members end up in our offices — but even prosecutors and municipal and state defense lawyers (speaking off the record, of course) express dismay at the frequency and manner in which Tasers are used.

By Amnesty International’s count, since 2001 over 500 people have died in the US as a result of Taser use. Police departments have just begun admitting there’s a problem. Cincinnati’s police chief has admitted Tasers can kill. Seattle won dismissal of the civil rights claims in a case case where they Tasered a pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket and, rather than crowing over their victory, said they had already changed their policy. It’s a start; as I’ve discussed before, the tendency of police departments to move from zealous law enforcement to brutality is all too common.

Alas, if you’re a criminal defense lawyer or a civil rights lawyer, then you instinctively rolled your eyes the moment you read the phrase “changed their policy.” To what? Do these new policies treat Tasers the way they should be treated — given the studies confirming real risks of heart attacks and skull fractures — as a means of last resort, literally a substitute for a bullet, instead of a more convenient means of obtaining compliance? Or do these new policies merely warn about “extended or repeated Taser exposure” — which some police officers will gladly read as including more than a minute of tasing, and dozens of shocks — with an all-purpose exception for “active resistance,” so the police officers can always claim the suspect was “actively resisting” and thereby comply with the Potemkin policy?

Which brings us to the point of this post. So, you’re a plaintiff’s lawyer, and a client (or their survivor) has just come in after a tasing incident. Now what?

There are three main claims you could bring: (1) excessive force civil rights claims against the cops; (2) a Monell practice or policy claim against the police department; and, (3) a products liability claim in strict liability or negligence against Taser International itself.

Excessive force claims (of all types, not just Tasers) are common; they’re disfavored by federal courts that are a bit too keen on summary judgment, but they’re typically inexpensive to litigate and can provide for attorney’s fees if successful, which is important because the verdicts and settlements are typically fairly low unless the client is brain damaged, paralyzed, or deceased. The real art is in distinguishing strong claims from merely meritorious ones in effectively conveying your own client’s version of events while undermining the police officer’s undoubtedly different version, and in grappling with the tendency of many jurors to believe your client got what was coming to them.

Monell claims are also tough. Courts rarely let any type of civil rights claim get to a jury, and courts are even more strict on Monell claims. There’s little harm in alleging them in the complaint, but get moving in discovery to back them up — and if you can’t back them up, know when to fold them and stop wasting everyone’s time. Truth is, Monell claims are generally not the province of generalist personal injury lawyers doing an occasional police brutality or wrongful prosecution case, they’re more for civil rights and public interest lawyers who have repeatedly seen the same problem and so already have the inside knowledge needed to back up the claims.

Finally, product liability lawsuits in general are not for the faint of heart nor plaintiff’s lawyers on shoestring budgets, and lawsuits directly against Taser International are no exception. Consider this: Taser won the first 60 product liability lawsuits filed against it, going back to the early 1990s, then finally lost one in 2008. Similarly, like with most product liability claims, plaintiffs’ firms should expect to pay $100,000 in costs just to get to a jury and should have the wherewithal to pay $250,000 on a single risky case. Needless to say, that means Taser product liability suits tend to make sense only when your client has been catastrophically injured or when your suit is on behalf of survivors. Study the Fontenot and Rich cases below; if you don’t have a case like that — e.g., a client who died from a heart attack after being tasered in the chest by a cop taught by Taser to go for “center of mass” — then consider forgoing the product liability claim because it’ll just chew up your time and money, reduce the recovery for your client, and create bad law for the rest of us. If you have a case like that but don’t have the ability to prepare or to fund it, refer it to someone who can.

Now, on to the law.Continue Reading A Trial Lawyer’s Guide To Taser Lawsuits