Legal Briefs

Damage awards now regularly set new records and go to an expanding array of plaintiffs. Some recent cases:

> After being hit in a schoolyard fight, Kelly Niles complained of a headache. But after an examination by the emergency room staff at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital, he was sent home by Pediatrician David Haskin. Hours later, Kelly was rushed back to the hospital, too late. Clotting blood from an artery severed by a skull fracture had put too much pressure on his brain stem. He was permanently paralyzed from the neck down and was also left mute. His IQ of 140 was not seriously affected, and he now communicates by flicking his eyes--left for yes, right for no, up and down for "I don't know." But he will need round-the-clock attendants for the rest of his life. Told of the 13-year-old's "alert mind in a useless body," a unanimous twelve-person jury awarded him $4,025,000, the bulk of it assessed against the hospital and the doctor. Though the defendants last week asked for a reduction or a new trial, for the time being the award appears to hold the record as the largest personal injury judgment in U.S. history.

> When Samuel Tito Williams was arrested in 1947 for the bludgeon murder of a 15-year-old Brooklyn girl, eleven of the arresting detectives were given $50 bonds by a grateful neighborhood association. Few, including the jury, paid any attention to Williams' claim that his confession came after he had been beaten with "a blackjack, a rubber hose and a club" and burned with "lighted cigarettes and cigars." Sentenced to death, Williams was held in jail for 16 years before a federal court of appeals ruled that his confession had been coerced. Since then he has been fighting to recover damages for his years of imprisonment. (He once came within 24 hours of execution.) Now a federal jury has ordered New York City to pay $120,000 on his claim that the city engaged in malicious prosecution and false arrest. It was a signal success in the growing trend of compensating the wrongfully imprisoned.

> Offered a better deal on an Olivetti duplicating machine, a branch of the South San Francisco public library replaced its SCM copier. Almost immediately the Olivetti began malfunctioning. Ink seeped onto the floor, paper tore, copies came out wet and smudged, coins with bits of chewing gum began sticking in the pay slot. The mystery ended when a librarian spotted SCM's regional sales manager with a companion who was tinkering with the machine. Olivetti's local marketer, Copico, sued SCM and introduced evidence that the corporation (formerly Smith-Corona) had a policy of using sabotage as a sales tactic--and had said so at two sales meetings. Copico also pointed out that SCM has been caught and assessed $150,000 in an earlier sabotage case. This time the jury decided to stiffen the penalty: it awarded $20,000 in compensatory damages and a cool $1,000,000 in punitive damages, the largest monetary punishment ever for commercial sabotage. "They wanted to give us $5,000,000," said Lawyer John Mc-Guinn last week after checking with jurors. "But I'm glad they didn't. SCM will appeal, and I think this judgment will probably stand."

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