TORPY: Want to win bigly in court? Get jurors with MAGA hats

His premise is arguable. Insurers are still making plenty of money, but Team Kemp wasn’t hot on adding limits to what insurers could charge.

Last week, I was talking to former Gov. Roy Barnes about the political climate when the self-proclaimed “country lawyer” went off on a tangent telling me: “Jurors are pissed off. They are pissed off against big business.”

Barnes would know. Last month, he was local counsel in a $2 billion punitive damages verdict against Monsanto, the maker of Roundup weed killer. A Cobb County jury found it more likely than not the popular herbicide caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma in a Georgia man.

The stunning verdict was just the public’s latest big-dollar slap at big businesses. In February, a federal jury in Columbus came in with a $2.5 billion verdict against Ford in connection with a rollover of an F250 “Super Duty” truck, a crash that killed a couple.

Credit: Courtesy of attorneys for Mills family

Credit: Courtesy of attorneys for Mills family

Megaverdicts are rarely collected whole because of endless appeals and judges whittling down the size of awards. Barnes says he wants the check for the final amount left on his tombstone.

I called Barnes back this week to opine on juror anger. On Monday, a trial started in Gwinnett County concerning possible sicknesses caused by exposure to a chemical used to sterilize medical products. It’s the first trial in Georgia in hundreds of lawsuits on the subject.

“The time when you get big verdicts is when there’s evidence of egregious conduct, where companies knew there was a defect (in their product or manufacturing process) and did not remedy that,” said Barnes, who’s made multiple millions winning over jurors.

That is pretty well-known. But then he continued.

“A lot of the anger with jurors is that they feel they are without power; that they are not controlling their government; that their government is controlling them,” Barnes said. “They do not have faith in the regulatory process, like the FDA or EPA. They think their government has been bought by lobbyists.”

I mentioned this sort of anger and mistrust in the system gave us Donald Trump.

“In focus groups we find that some of the angriest jurors are MAGA supporters,” he said. “We don’t strike these jurors. We let them sit.”

In the recent $2 billion Roundup case, he said: “I don’t think we had more than two or three Democrats on that jury.”

In the old days, before the world went crazy, it was bleeding-heart Dems whom plaintiffs’ lawyers wanted. They were the ones more apt to stick it to the Man — the Man being ACME Widgets Corp.

Barnes said he’ll still strike old-timey Republicans — you know, the country clubbing, pro-business types — from his juries.

“But the MAGA jurors, I’ll keep them in a heartbeat,” he said. “It’s surprising when I tell people.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

You know you’ve punched a ticket to Bizzarro World when Georgia’s last Democratic governor would strike Gov. Brian Kemp from a jury but would keep Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Not that I don’t believe the esteemed former governor, but I still checked it out. I found a jury consultant in Ohio did a study that discovered “those with a stronger belief in conspiracy theories tended to support the plaintiff and those with little to no belief in them tended to support the defendant.”

“When we controlled for the conspiracy variable, Republicans were significantly more likely to side with the defendant than Democrats,” Nick Polavin, the study’s author, wrote. “But bring that variable back in, and we saw that as Republicans believed in more conspiracies, they became more likely to side with the plaintiff. A deeper look at the data showed that far right-wing Republicans were more likely to find for the plaintiff, while moderate Republicans were more likely to find for the defense.”

That is, jurors who love Trump and can’t stand Liz Cheney will stick it to the Man, just like the libs.

The study found the conspiracists don’t trust federal agencies, are anti-corporate, lack trust in scientists, have low education and “rely on their own intuition.”

Get a few of them on a jury and some CEO’s liable to be cutting a big check.

I called Adam Malone, who has had some record-breaking verdicts in the world of medical malpractice.

Credit: TNS

Credit: TNS

“I’d never disagree with Gov. Barnes; I don’t think he’s wrong,” Malone said. “But the sentiment against the powerful abusing people is not just one side of the political spectrum.”

He says there’s an endless array of factors within each potential juror that lawyers must suss out during jury selection. “I’m sensing people are fed up and short on patience for industry to do things right,” he said.

Denise de La Rue, an attorney and veteran trial consultant told me that “after COVID, people were pissed off and ready to take that feeling out on someone.”

So, who is most cheesed off?

“People are irked. The question is: ‘Irked at whom?’” de La Rue said. “What day is it? What time is it? It changes so quickly.”

She recalled the spinning carnival rides when centrifugal force glues riders to the wall, adding: “I feel like I’m on that ride.”

It does get dizzying.