In case you’ve been too busy with distractions like Sunday’s Super Bowl and the Super Tuesday Presidential primaries, let me remind you that this Friday is the one-year anniversary of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Yes, that Anna Nicole Smith. The former Playmate of the Month who went on to delight the tabloid press in 1994 when she married 89-year-old Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, whom she’d met at a Houston strip club where Smith performed.
The groom died of natural causes the next year at the age of 90. Shortly afterward, Smith filed a lawsuit demanding half of the huge estate the oilman left behind. Smith was not named in Marshall’s will, but claimed he had made verbal promises that she would share in it and accused Marshall’s son and legal heir, Pierce Marshall, of interfering with his father’s wishes.
Smith’s death a year ago from an apparent overdose of prescription drugs at age 39 attracted a feeding frenzy by the media. Now the Anna Nicole Smith story blessedly shows signs of fading away altogether, but not the litigation she filed for Marshall’s estate. The fact that this case is still with us after more than 10 years is an embarrassing monument to America’s cumbersome legal liability system and the lawyers who have made it into a $250 billion a year industry.
It’s quite true that everyone is entitled to their day in court, and Smith had hers. In fact, the case she filed in a Texas probate court took 95 days. The court heard volumes of testimony, thoroughly reviewed the facts and ruled against Smith. Logically, that should have been the end of the case, but legally it was just the beginning.
The case has become a model of what’s known as jackpot justice – a system that allows lawyers who don’t like a decision in one court to shop around the country for a new one where they might hit the jackpot.
Smith’s lawsuit has been on a court-clogging cross-country tour from Texas to California, reaching the Supreme Court in Washington before returning to California. When Smith filed a dubious personal bankruptcy claim in federal court in California, her lawyers pulled the Marshall estate into it and started the case all over again. They temporarily hit the jackpot when the bankruptcy court chided Piece Marshall for failure to comply with its pre-trial discovery instructions and awarded Smith $475 million from the estate.
Marshall predictably appealed to the federal district court, which overturned the bankruptcy court’s ruling and awarded Smith a piddling $88 million. Maybe they thought that would at least pay her legal fees. This decision was overruled by the federal appeals court of the Ninth Circuit in California, which pointed out that state decisions in probate cases – those involving wills and estates – are not supposed to be tinkered with by federal courts. That bit of law is known as the “probate exception.”
So this traveling circus moved to the Supreme Court, whose ruling on the merits of the case backed the findings of the original probate court back in Texas. But instead of sending everybody home with a final decision, the Supremes sent it back to the appeals court in California for a closer look at the question of probate exception.
The big question for the rest of us is simple. How much longer we will tolerate this quagmire of a legal system that will delay justice as long as the lawyers get paid?
Posted on February 7th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: National
*big sigh*
Hopefully, not long.