Kill the Lawyers First

Dennis Prager has some sad but also frightening things to say about the legal profession.

Though there are many fine people in the legal profession, and though law is necessary to protect society from descending into chaos, I now fear the legal profession more than I do Islamic terror.

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Law in America and internationally is no longer on the side of the decent. It is a weapon in the hands of the indecent.

Dennis mentioned two cases on his radio program today. In this one, the judge allowed Shell to be added to the list of defendents in the Rhode Island nightclub fire because tickets to the concert were given out at a Shell gas station.

Attorney Ronald Resmini, who sued for damages in federal court last month, said he added Shell Oil and its affiliate, Motiva Enterprises LLC, to his lawsuit because The Station nightclub owners distributed tickets to their club from a Shell gas station they owned.

"They were giving away free tickets if you bought so much merchandise," Resmini said.

The second one, the State of California is suing octogenarians and nonagenarians for polluting Chico's water supply when they worked in the dry cleaning industry. Who are these defendents? 93 year old Vart Vartabedian and his wife Jean who is in her late 80s.

Their longtime friends Bob and Inez Heidinger -- he's 87, has Alzheimer's disease and is blind in one eye; she's 83, has bone marrow cancer and needs shoulder surgery -- also are being sued.

So are Betty Rollag, a Chico widow, and about a half-dozen other retired and elderly residents of this college town who the state says are responsible for poisoning much of the city's water.

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They are former dry cleaners accused of pouring a toxic cleaning substance known as PCE down the drains of their businesses.

But it's not just people who were in the dry cleaning business decades ago.

Also named in the suit are the city of Chico, whose sewers in the contaminated area are cracked and leaking, and Paul Tullius, a 57-year-old retired Air Force pilot, and his wife, Vicki, who own a warehouse that last housed a dry cleaner in 1972 -- 16 years before they bought the building without knowing its entire history.

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Tullius bought a warehouse in downtown Chico in 1988 to store old cars he used to collect. He said he had no idea it had housed a dry cleaner from 1964 until 1972, and even if he had, he wouldn't have thought much of it.

But because his name is on the title to the building, which he's leasing to a Chico homeless shelter, he's been told that he and his wife are liable, too.

Perhaps, the homeless shelter should be sued as well.

Were these dastardly polluters trying to save a few bucks? No, they followed standard disposal techniques of the time.

In the Heidingers' case, the damage was supposedly done between the time they opened in 1952 and sold in 1974. The state claims the Heidingers' cleaning machines pumped PCE into the sewers.

In a signed affidavit, however, Heidinger said his machines were self-contained and that no PCE went down the drain. Instead, the chemical was recycled through his machines and a sludge residue was placed in 5-gallon buckets and disposed in the garbage -- standard procedure for getting rid of PCE then. Today, companies typically hire disposal firms, and the waste is taken to special landfills.

And what does this do to our civil society?

As for the man who sold him the building 15 years ago, Tullius said: "He's sort of become a friend, but I'm going to have to sue him, and I suppose he'll have to sue the person he bought it from."

It's no wonder that the legal profession is so rightly reviled. Dennis rightly concludes his article with this statement.

And now a trial lawyer is seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for president. He ought to win it. Trial lawyers are, after all, the largest contributors to him and to his party. And if that doesn't frighten enough Americans, we will cease being a free country.