Jump to full article: Main Justice, 2009-11-01
Author: Joe Palazzolo
Intro: The recently retired lead prosecutor in the case against Mississippi trial lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs has written an insider’s account of the sensational judicial bribery scandal that sent the billionaire tobacco litigator, his son and several associates to prison.
Veteran former prosecutor Tom Dawson teamed up with conservative Mississippi legal blogger Alan Lange to examine the Scruggs case and the conviction of another Mississippi trial lawyer named Paul Minor.
“Kings of Tort: The True Story of Dickie Scruggs, Paul Minor and Two Decades of Political and Legal Manipulation in Mississippi” will be published in December. . . .
In the 1990s, Scruggs teamed up with Missisippi’s Democratic state Attorney General, Michael Moore, to sue major tobacco companies. One of Scrugg’s adversaries in the tobacco wars was his former fraternity brother at Ole Miss, Haley Barbour, then chairman of the Republican National Committee and an ally of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a vigorous advocate of tort reform.
Barbour was elected governor of Mississippi in 2003, a position he still holds today. The state legislature passed a Barbour-sponsored law limiting the ability to file tort claims in the state.
Scruggs reportedly earned $1 billion in fees from the tobacco litigation, and his role was memorialized in a movie, The Insider. . . .
Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oxford continue to investigate Scrugg's former associate, P.L. Blake, a Mississippi Delta farmer who reportedly was paid $50 million for helping Scruggs in the tobacco litigation in the 1990s.
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