Health Care / Medicine, Labor / Employment, Lawsuit of the Day, Tort Reform, Trials

Lawsuit of the Day: Don't Lie About Brain Tumors

onAugust 25, 2009 at 2:07 PM

The Connecticut Employment Law Blog reports on the kind of plaintiff that gives other plaintiffs a bad name:

In the middle of trial, a plaintiff (who is claiming his employment was terminated, among other reasons, in retaliation of his exercise of FMLA rights) drops a bombshell:

“[In the prior October], I learned that I had — have stage III prostate cancer with a metastatic brain lesion.”

What kind of client just blurts out “metastatic brain lesion” in open court? What kind of counsel allows that to happen?
Not surprisingly, defense counsel moved for a mistrial. The judge called a hearing, and then the idiot plaintiff had something else to say:

Sponsored

Navigating Financial Success by Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Firm Performance

In this CLE-eligible webinar, we’ll explore the most common accounting pitfalls and how to avoid them for your firm.

From Pilot and Above The Law

During the hearing, however, there’s another another unexpected development: The medical records show that the employee did not have (and never had) a metastatic brain lesion.

The plaintiff knew he didn’t have a brain lesion — though it seems self evident that something upstairs is not working properly in this guy’s head.
Is this a situation that demands more than a mistrial?

It’s totally obvious that the court granted a mistrial in the case. But the defense attorneys moved for a full dismissal of the suit — since the plaintiff was a lying bastard:

Dismissal, according to a federal court decision released on Friday.
In Radecki v. GlaxoSmithKline (download here), the court concluded that the plaintiff committed perjury in his testimony and that because the perjury was so serious, dismissal was the only appropriate mechanism.
Having “concluded that the plaintiff willfully provided false testimony for the improper purpose of causing the jury to feel sympathy for him”, the Court discussed how perjury during trial is “intolerable.” Any sanction other than dismissal would give the appearance of the court’s tacit approval of such conduct.