Mississippi Justice on Email
How the plaintiffs bar-attorney general nexus works in the raw.
The Wall Street Journal
July 28, 2010
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood trekked to Washington in May to ask Congress to rewrite federal law so he can sue Gulf oil spill companies in state court. Like so many state AGs these days, Mr. Hood is looking to cash in with his Magnolia State legal home boys one more time.
For a backstage look at what's doing in Jackson, we recommend a tour through the emails made public this month as part of litigation related to Mr. Hood's last big legal shakedown, against insurers after Hurricane Katrina. As we wrote at the time, Mr. Hood used his powers of criminal investigation to soak property and casualty insurers, and to ensure that his trial bar retinue got part of the cut. A particularly large share went to tort kingpin Dickie Scruggs, who is now in jail for an unrelated attempt to bribe a judge.
In a March 15, 2007 "Mississippi Justice" editorial, we laid out how this AG-Scruggs back-scratching worked. Scruggs had coached two sisters who worked as adjustors to take some 15,000 pages of documents from a State Farm contractor. When a federal judge ordered Scruggs to return what he called the "purloined" documents, Mr. Hood interceded, advising Scruggs to send the documents to him—out of the reach of the federal court and State Farm, which wouldn't know what had been taken and would be less able to defend itself.
Mr. Hood then used the threat of the documents to pressure State Farm to settle simultaneously with him and Scruggs for $130 million. This tag-team mugging was so blatant that the federal judge asked that Scruggs be prosecuted for criminal contempt and stated that Mr. Hood and Scruggs had "teamed up to bully State Farm into civil and criminal settlements." Even the federal judge who ultimately dismissed the contempt charges against Scruggs on technical grounds agreed there was a "cloud of suspicion surrounding the agreement between Scruggs and Hood."
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Copyright
2010