Accusations Of 'Double Dipping'

by Mike Tolson - September 10th, 2006 - Houston Chronicle

Accusations of 'double dipping' — trying to use the same client for 2 different claims — surface

When Roger Redditt died of lung cancer in 2002, there seemed no great mystery as to why. Though only 50, he had smoked all of his adult life — two packs a day for most of it, cutting down to a single pack over the final five years.

Then lawyers got involved, and four years later Redditt's cause of death remains a point of contention. The longtime welder and one-time sandblaster has become a potentially significant figure in the national scandal involving silicosis lawsuits.

Attorneys for his widow, two sets of them, filed lawsuits blaming others for Redditt's cancer. One claimed exposure to asbestos led to his death, and Debra Redditt has already collected settlements from some of those defendants. The other set of attorneys point to a long-ago employer as the real cause of his death by exposing him to crystalline silica, an industrial sand used in sandblasting and other applications.

Attorneys for a handful of silica defendants say the cigarettes surely killed him — and insist his case is a classic example of abuse of the tort system.

This is a great article on the corruption of America's system of extortion and blackmail, referred to by its supporters as a "justice system". That referrence is of course mostly a joke, as justice has not been the goal for over 100 years. The American court system is a system that allows attorneys to extort money, and makes judges powerful rulers, all the while making sure that justice is never the goal.

"There is a pattern of some lawyers in not being straight with courts, and in this case not being straight with Congress," said Lisa Rickard, president of U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform and a longtime critic of mass torts. "It's incredibly brazen behavior, which is not atypical for the plaintiff bar."

The proof that there is no concern with justice though is that neither the lawyers nor the judges that have allowed billions to be extorted from the American populace ever go to jail, even when proven they have lied. They are simply not allowed to win some of their cases and they go on with their extortion scheme in other cases as if nothing happened.

Welcome to the "rule of judges".


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