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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
From out of nowhere or, more precisely, from out of the Texas prison system, Willie's estranged biological father intervened and asked for time to allow him to prepare for the case. Willie's attorneys wondered if Ford's defense team had contacted him in an attempt to slow the proceedings. But lawyers on Ford's defense team insisted they had nothing to do with the father's request. Visitor logs at the prison where the father was incarcerated suggested otherwise. Margaret Keliher, a lawyer on Ford's defense team who was later elected Dallas County judge, had visited the prison. Four years later, while working on a book, I asked her if she had gone to the prison to bring Willie's father into the case. She told me that a lot of time had passed and the question -- whether, as a corporate defense attorney, she had traveled to East Texas to meet with a convicted criminal -- was taxing her memory. When Willie's lawyers warned his father that intervention in the case would delay his son's trial, he withdrew.
Ford is always a dogged defendant. One of its in-house lawyers explained the company's litigation strategy to the National Law Journal. Ford would make only one pretrial offer. "I don't give a shit if they take it or not," Ford lawyer James A. Brown told the Journal. "If the plaintiff doesn't settle, it doesn't matter to us. We tell them 'we're coming after you.'"
At the end of the four-month trial, an East Texas jury took only four hours to award Willie Searcy $30 million. On the following day, it met for 90 minutes and awarded the Searcy family an additional $10 million in punitive damages. Jack Ayres had asked for $26 million.
Predictably, Ford came after Willie Searcy and his lawyers. The company appealed both the jury decision and Ayres' filing of his pre-appeal motions in what they claimed was the wrong appeals court. Willie Searcy lost another year, getting none of his jury award. What was finally ruled to be the appropriate appeals court overturned the $10 million in punitive damages and raised one legal question about the $30 million award, which it allowed to stand.
Ford's legal team then took the $30 million in actual damages to the Texas Supreme Court. But the attorneys were decent enough to request an expedited hearing of the case. They recognized that Willie Searcy was kept alive by a patched-together system involving state caretakers, friends, and family working with him at home. There was no backup ventilator or generator to cover a temporary power failure. On paper, Willie was a millionaire, with a jury award that would have provided first-class healthcare. At home in a Dallas suburb, he lived in healthcare limbo.
On the Texas Supreme Court, cases are assigned by a blind draw. Justices pick up cards with case names on them and take charge of those cases. One of the cards Priscilla Owen picked up as the court began its 1996 session had "Miles v. Ford" written on it. "That kid's fate was decided when Justice Owen picked that card," said a lawyer who worked at the Supreme Court at the time.
Priscilla Owen was a Karl Rove candidate for the Supreme Court. An oil and gas lawyer from Houston, she had never been a judge when Bush's lifetime political advisor made her the candidate for an open seat in 1994 and helped direct her successful campaign. Republicans were methodically taking state government away from the Democrats, and Rove was the architect of the takeover, recruiting candidates for statewide office and directing their campaigns. Rove had advised the campaigns of every candidate on the Supreme Court (and the governor and both U.S. senators). On the bench, Owen positioned herself to the right of the court's most conservative justice, Nathan Hecht, whom she occasionally dated. They were kept in check (in the courtroom) by a centrist bloc led by Deborah Hankinson, a 1997 Bush appointee whom the Wall Street Journal described as "the rising star on the Texas Supreme Court."
Two years after the lawyers representing Willie Searcy and the lawyers representing Ford had requested an expedited hearing, Owen wrote the majority opinion. A process that could have been completed within months of the oral argument in November 1996 dragged on until Owen completed her opinion in March 1998.
