Illinois Deserves the Truth

Madigan Taking it to Distributor of Flawed Children's Product

You may have heard the phrase “profits over people”, but how about “profits over little people”?  Sounds even worse, doesn’t it?  IL Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed a lawsuit yesterday to force the distributor of a dangerous crib to stop peddling the product once and for all.  The Simplicity bassinet made the news earlier this year when we learned that its flawed design caused at least two infant deaths.  But despite knowing this, distributor SFCA refused to participate in a recall.  Their argument, in a nutshell: ‘Hey, we’re not the ones who designed it’.  Details on the suit:

Madigan’s lawsuit asks the court to prohibit SFCA from selling and distributing the unsafe bassinets in Illinois and to require SFCA to:
* Hire an independent consultant to develop a product safety protocol and review all of SFCA’s product designs to ensure compliance with safety standards;
* Recall all Simplicity bassinets that use the recalled design;
* Provide refunds to retailers who issued refunds or store credits to consumers who returned Simplicity bassinets; and
* Notify the public of CPSC recalls by advertising in newspapers throughout Illinois.

Let’s hope the suit accomplishes all of these objectives.  Go to the website for Kids In Danger for more on children’s product safety.

Illinois News Roundup

Illinois will pocket $3 million from a 33-state settlement over deceptive marketing practices by drug manufacturer Pfizer.

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The FDA announced a new website for consumers looking into current FDA safety efforts.  Visit it at http://www.fda.gov/cder/drugSafety.htm.

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Doctors misdiagnosed a 33 year old Chicago man's heart condition five times, leading to an infection and eventually a permanently disabling stroke.  Last week, the man settled his lawsuit with those responsible.

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Another faulty children’s product recall: this time it’s 1.6 million Delta cribs responsible for several infant deaths.

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The Department of Justice and AGs from 13 states – including neighbors Iowa and Missouri - filed a lawsuit to stop a merger of two of the nation’s top beef packers. 

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The FDA denied Illinois-based Abbott Labs’ request for approval of their extended-release Vicodin.

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Read this sobering article about how seniors have had to watch their legal rights slowly stripped away in recent years.

Memo to U.S. Supreme Court: Immunity Bad! Reading the Newspaper Good!

Cross posted from The Pop Tort by Andy Hoffman

As we count down the days before the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in the big “preemption” case, Wyeth v. Levine, the news has been filled with compelling evidence that granting drug companies complete immunity from lawsuits is a truly terrible idea.  Here are a few samples…

Citing a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Wall Street Journal reported today  that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “is failing to keep accurate data about foreign drug facilities it is supposed to oversee and often doesn't follow up warning letters with inspections.”

A new study out of the Netherlands found that “Nearly one in four recently approved products in a relatively new class of medicines needed some type of regulatory action because of safety issues that arose after they came on the market,” according to the USA Today.

Meanwhile, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in anticipation of Wyeth, has written an editorial forcefully condemning blanket immunity for drug and medical device manufacturers.  Here’s an excerpt.

“Given the current imperfect process for approval and the flawed postmarketing surveillance system, the drug and device regulation process is at best an inexact and incomplete science. Until these deficiencies in the system are remedied, some patients inevitably will continue to experience harm from the use of newly marketed products as well as from use of other approved medications. Just as with other consumer products that cause harms, consumers (ie, patients) who are injured by defective medical devices or by pharmaceutical products with inadequate warnings of potential harms may have to resort to legal action as recourse for their injuries…Litigation and state tort law ‘provides a system of civil justice designed to compensate patients, deter unreasonably hazardous conduct, and encourage innovation in product design, packaging, labeling, and advertising.”

“Thus, tort law serves in effect as a way to close regulatory gaps in the FDA premarketing approval process and to provide a mechanism for postmarketing surveillance. Moreover, litigation has been a rich source of information about how drug and device manufacturing companies behave, such as with off-label promotion, guest and ghost authorship, and reporting of safety findings. Without the information revealed by the public release of documents in tort liability actions, many of these behaviors would remain unknown, some drug manufacturers’ judgments about safety issues would be hidden from view, review, or oversight, and the FDA would not be able to uncover them either…”

Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Big Business spends a lot of time and money whining about the need for "tort reform", but that doesn’t stop them from turning around and quietly using the courts themselves.  Lately, we need look no further than a trio of homegrown Chicago-area corporations that evidently think the civil justice system is great (as long as they're the plaintiffs, that is).

• Deerfield-based pharmacy chain Walgreen Co., which filed a suit against drug manufacturer Wyeth.

• Schaumburg-based iPCS Inc., a telecom company suing affiliate Sprint Nextel.

• Riverwoods-based Discover Financial Services, the credit card company that recently settled its suit against Visa and Mastercard.

Let's see...pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and credit card companies.  Yeah, those industries just love the civil justice system.  Visit The Pop Tort ‘hypocrisy’ page for more examples corporate duplicity.

Faces of Predatory Lending Victims

All you hear about on the economy nowadays is Wall Street and what effect our crisis situation will have on stockholders.  So it’s nice when, every once in a while, reporters turn the lamp to spotlight ordinary consumers.  The Sun-Times did an excellent job of putting a human face on victims of mortgage scams in a recent series of articles/posts (see these links - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)  Each story profiles a different victim.  You'll notice that Dorothy Davis and the Harris family, from the first two stories, respectively, turned to the civil courts for justice.

Countrywide Still Doesn't Get It

Earlier this month, a lawsuit by the IL Attorney General led to a deal with Countrywide - once Illinois' largest subprime lender - that included loan modifications for struggling homeowners, cash compensation for people unfairly forced out of their homes, and a statewide foreclosure freeze.  Yesterday, citing the settlement and a lack of "community confidence", the state Department of Financial Regulation banned Countrywide from issuing new loans in Illinois.  You think that would stop Countrywide? 

Headline from a Tribune story this morning: Countrywide to ignore state ruling.

While Countrywide Home Loans operates under a state license, Countrywide Bank, which issues most of its loans, is federally chartered, and therefore can give the one-finger salute to state regulators.  I'm glad to see they care so much about rebuilding all that lost community confidence.

Complete Immunity from Lawsuits – The Lasting Damage of the Bush Administration

Cross post from The Pop Tort by Andy Hoffman

A fantastic new investigative report from the American Association for Justice (AAJ) called “Get Out of Jail Free: A Historical Perspective of How the Bush Administration Helps Corporations Escape Accountability”  finds, through documents obtained from a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, that “multiple federal agencies were repeatedly ordered to usurp state law and undermine consumer protections,” for the purpose of giving total immunity to corporations instead.

This issue – preemption – is one of the hottest civil justice topics today.  The anti-consumer U.S. Supreme Court could soon give its blessing to this massive Bush Administration effort, which was also highlighted today by  the Wall Street Journal.  Check out the article and video detailing how the Bush administration intends to spend its last days in office rewriting “a wide array” of federal rules that could prevent product-safety suits by injured consumers for years to come…  According to the article,

The administration has written language aimed at pre-empting product-liability litigation into 50 rules governing everything from motorcycle brakes to pain medicine. The latest changes cap a multiyear effort that could be one of the administration's lasting legacies, depending in part on how the underlying principle of pre-emption fares in a case the Supreme Court will hear next month.....The use of rulemaking to protect corporations from product liability was discussed from early in the Bush administration, said former Bush domestic-policy adviser Jay Lefkowitz, who was instrumental in the process.

 

Illinois News Roundup

Just over the state border in Whiting, Ind., federal regulators are taking BP to task for expanding its refinery in violation of the Clean Air Act.

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The Tribune rolled out an editorial about the shady connections between "unbiased" medical experts and the drug companies that pay them.

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Schaumburg-based Motorola must answer to former employees who claim toxic chemicals from their workplace caused birth defects in their children.

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In St. Louis, a sixteen-year-old girl was harassed online to the point that she had to seek help from a mental health clinic.  Her father is asking the court to force several social networking sites, which hosted the abusive exchanges, to help him find out exactly who was responsible.

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Another Chicago priest is accused of child molestation.  His victims brought a suit against him last year, and now he faces a criminal trial.

Supreme Court Begins the New Term Wrestling With Preemption

Cross post from The Pop Tort by Andy Hoffman

Well civil justice fans, it’s opening day for the U.S. Supreme Court, and first up on the Court’s docket is the federal preemption case, Altria v. Good.

In a nutshell, the tobacco company Altria Group is trying to get the Supreme Court to scuttle a class action suit against it that was brought under Maine’s deceptive advertising laws, based on its suggesting that “low tar” and “light” cigarettes were a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes. They’re not. But the company is trying to argue that because there’s a 1965 federal law on the books that regulates this area, cigarette companies should be completely immune from liability – no matter how deceptive their advertising is.

Reports about today’s arguments suggest that the court seemed split, even though the Bush Administration was on the side of the smokers! One report said, “Justice Samuel Alito and other justices blasted the FTC for continuing to allow cigarette companies to make light cigarette claims. ‘You've created this whole problem,’ Alito said, lecturing Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, an assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General. ‘You have misled everyone who bought these cigarettes for a long time.’”

Well civil justice fans, it’s opening day for the U.S. Supreme Court, and first up on the Court’s docket is the federal preemption case, Altria v. Good.

In a nutshell, the tobacco company Altria Group is trying to get the Supreme Court to scuttle a class action suit against it that was brought under Maine’s deceptive advertising laws, based on its suggesting that “low tar” and “light” cigarettes were a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes. They’re not. But the company is trying to argue that because there’s a 1965 federal law on the books that regulates this area, cigarette companies should be completely immune from liability – no matter how deceptive their advertising is.

Reports about today’s arguments suggest that the court seemed split, even though the Bush Administration was on the side of the smokers! One report said, “Justice Samuel Alito and other justices blasted the FTC for continuing to allow cigarette companies to make light cigarette claims. ‘You've created this whole problem,’ Alito said, lecturing Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, an assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General. ‘You have misled everyone who bought these cigarettes for a long time.’”

Countrywide Settlement Means Help for Illinois Homeowners

Over the weekend, IL Attorney General Lisa Madigan and other state AGs announced an $8.8 billion, multi-state lawsuit settlement with Countrywide Financial (now controlled by Bank of America).  I lamented in a post last week that despite the great work of several state AGs, homeowners were still stuck without much help when it came to modifying their loans.  I guess I spoke too soon.  According to the Tribune, the Countrywide deal could help 21,000 Illinoisans keep their homes. 

Bank of America, which is settling the lawsuit, purchased Countrywide earlier this year as Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan and other attorneys general were investigating allegations of fraud against the lending giant. Bank of America promised to work out new mortgages at interest rates as low as 2.5 percent and pay cash compensation to people who already have lost their homes.

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The settlement should help Illinois homeowners reduce their payment obligations by as much as $185 million, said a spokeswoman for Madigan. As part of the settlement, Countrywide has agreed to halt foreclosure sales and not initiate foreclosure proceedings for customers likely to qualify for the program. The program applies to people who received mortgages from Countrywide before Dec. 31, 2007.

This is a much-needed victory for struggling homeowners and further testament to the importance of the offices of state attorneys general.  Read more about their work in this CJ&D white paper.