I am a former Buckeye and I guess things have not changed alot since I left in the mid-eighties. Then, as now, the Supreme Court prtected Big Business, while sacrificing the rights of individual citizens and, well, here they go again!

The Columbus Dispatch reports that in a 5 to 2 ruling the “justices” upheld caps on non-economic damages. The law limits the amounts injured victims can collect for “human damages” to a maximum of $350,000.

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You go to your local pharmacy to have your prescription filled, just like you have a number of times before. You give the handwritten prescription to the young person behind the desk and they return with your prescription, complete with a label on the front and the pre-printed instructions in the bag. You take the prescription as directed on the label and soon you develop a severe headache. Without any warning you unknowingly have developed significant bleeding inside your brain and before very long you have suffered brain injury so severe that you cannot communicate or move most of your body. You find yourself severely brain injured and are incapable of caring for the three children you held so dearly.

This is what happened to one of my clients. It seems like such a small mistake; just an extra key typed. You probably think that a pharmacist fills your prescription when you bring it into your pharmacy. That’s not the case. The actual person filling your prescription is the pharmacy technician. Pharmacy technicians are essentially assistants or helpers to the pharmacists. Pharmacy technicians are not required to have any education at all. They simply must be 16 years of age in Florida to qualify to fill prescriptions in a pharmacy.

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Is the phrase, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” in the constitution? Popular belief is yes, but it is not actually in the constitution. Rather, this phrase comes from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. It is probably a concept that should have been incorporated into the constitution and certainly Lincoln included it to remind citizens that it is their country. I think politicians, and even some of us, forget that it is OUR government and the politicians are OUR employees; they are supposed to be working in OUR best interests.

Business interests are fond of complaining about the jury system and regularly claim that it is “broken”, it needs to be “fixed”. Perhaps the best word is, in fact, “fixed”; they would like to fix the civil justice system so that it can be better influenced in their direction. Should we hold it against them because they work to achieve an unfair playing field? We should not hate Big Corporations for this, but should we allow them to achieve it? Absolutely not!

I think the jury system our founding fathers borrowed from English common law works just fine in protecting the rights of individual citizens. Frankly, I want six of my fellow citizens sitting and listening to evidence in my case. I want six regular people considering what makes sense and what does not make sense. I do not want a special panel appointed to hear my case, as has been promoted by many business “political parrots”. I do not want the government inserting itself into the civil justice system anymore than they already do. I trust an impartial panel of my fellow citizens to fairly weigh the evidence and reach a decision that makes sense.

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