Chicago Injury Law Blog

It is no wonder that Plaintiff Mike Humeston lost in his trial against Merck on Friday. Recent comments by the jurors in the trial indicate that corporate deception is not only common place, but accepted as part of business. The following is an except from the Wall Street Journal:

Juror Marie Kerr, a 51-year-old administrative assistant, said she and other jurors read through the emails while deliberating and felt many of the inflammatory lines were taken out of context.

"We read the emails completely, and not just the part that said 'bastards,' " she said. Ms. Kerr also said she wasn't moved by a Merck document titled "Dodgeball" that Mr. Seeger portrayed as a way to teach sales representatives how to avoid questions about heart attacks. "We've all seen games like dodgeball at our work," she said.

Overall, Merck succeeded in persuading jurors that concerns voiced by Dr. Scolnick and other executives were a normal part of the scientific process of discovery and of safety investigations. Vickie Heintz, a 40-year-old juror, said she felt Mr. Seeger "cherry picked" a few select emails and tried to impugn the company with them.

Ms. Heintz said she wasn't bothered by Merck's aggressive marketing of Vioxx or documents that showed the company calculating the loss in profits if the warning label was changed to reflect increased risk of heart attack. "Medicine is business," she said. "If I had a business I would calculate what the loss of one of my big products would mean...This is about making money. Merck doesn't do this because they are flower people."

Another juror, Patricia Harley, 44, said: "If someone peeked through all my emails, forget about it."

I do not question the result the jury found in this case. However I must comment that their statements afterwards are a terrifying wake up call to all Americans of the moral decline in our country. That a company's malfeasance is quickly justified by comments like "Merck doesn't do this because they are flower people" and "[w]e've all seen games like Dodgeball at our work" is scary to say the least.

Scary too say the least. Making money takes the place of saving lives? Auto Industry got hammered keeping safety issues from us. These guys "KILL PEOPLE" and jury says: "thats business". One life is one too many. And these people are raising children?

The better explanation is that the only deception is that practiced by attorneys trying to pretend that innocuous documents are evidence of "corporate deception" and an educated jury saw through it.

Since we are looking for explanations, explain how an attorney 'pretends' that a document given to sales representatives named "Dodgeball" is anything but evidence of corporate deception. I invite all readers to look at this actual document and determine for themselves how 'innocuous' it actually is (http://www.chicagoinjurylawblog.com/78-print.html with special attention to page 37).
The fact is even the present jury determined that this and other documents were evidence of wrongdoing. They just did not have a problem with it. By their own statements the evidence was damning--just mitigated in their minds by the everyday practice of doing business.