LAS VEGAS -- For the third time, Clark County courts have been dubbed judicial hellholes by a national special interest group.
The American Tort Reform Association has long accused local courts of favoring personal injury plaintiffs. But this year it points to a single case with a $500 million verdict as evidence of what's wrong with justice in southern Nevada.
The verdict last May against two drug companies, Teva Parenteral Medicines and Baxter Healthcare Corp, sent a message, according to plaintiff Henry Chanin, that they should change their ways.
Instead of manufacturing and distributing large-sized bottles of the anesthetic propofal, the companies should only produce single-use vials to discourage re-use. If they had, Chanin argued, he might not have contracted hepatitis C during a routine procedure at the Desert Shadow Endoscopy Center, one of several local clinics linked to a hepatitis C outbreak in 2008.
Yet what Chanin heralds as a victory for consumer rights, others see as evidence of a judicial system gone wrong.
"If there's any justice at all in the state, you've got to believe that the verdict will be overturned on appeal," said Darren McKinney with the American Tort Reform Association.
McKinney lists this case as exhibit A for its determination that the Clark County courts are a judicial hellhole, one of six jurisdictions singled out by the group as unfair to corporate interests.
McKinney takes issue with the Chanin case, not only for the amount of the verdict, but the for the choice of defendants -- the drug companies instead of clinic owner Dr. Depak Desai.
"Desai is facing 28 criminal charges, health officials in the county have shut down his clinics, yet Jessie Walsh and the plaintiffs lawyers decide, well, Desai has no money, he's declared bankruptcy, we'll settle with him out of court. Let's go after the drug manufacturer and the distributor. Let's blame them," he said.
While judicial ethics prevent Judge Jennifer Togliatti, the newly-elected chief judge of the Eighth Judicial District Court, from commenting on a specific case still before the court, she insists it's unfair to label an entire legal system based on a single case.
"What's not in that report is the hundreds, if not thousands, of defense verdicts and defense granted summary judgements that exist every day. That are being either granted by the court or by juries. Juries in this jurisdiction have no problem looking at a plaintiff and saying you haven't proven your case," she said.
