Last
week, Connecticut’s Supreme Court overturned on process grounds a jury's
decision that the state of Connecticut should pay $18.3 million to Computers
Plus, a company that once operated out of East Hartford.
The jury found that the
state – specifically, then quick-to-sue Attorney General Richard Blumenthal -- had
defamed the owner of the company and violated her due-process rights. The
jury’s multi-million dollar award should be taken as an indication of the depth
of the state’s perfidy in driving Computer Plus out of business on a fraudulent
claim of wrongdoing.
The jury award was later whittled
down by another judge who, punitively in the interests of justice, moved the
decimal point an integer to the left and reduced the jury’s award to $1.83
million.
Judges in Connecticut are
loathed to incur the wrath of politicians, and Attorney General Richard
Blumenthal had for 20 years been a very resourceful politician. Before Mr.
Blumenthal killed Computer Plus, it ought to be noted, the company was a very
successful woman owned small business.
Mr. Blumenthal is now a U.S.
Senator in Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation. During
his progress up the greasy pole, Mr. Blumenthal had crawled over heaps of bodies
in order to arrive at his exalted position, one of them being the owner of
Computer Plus, who did not take kindly to being defamed by Mr. Blumenthal and so
sued him. The case was strong enough to have persuaded a jury of Mr.
Blumenthal’s peers that he had wronged the lady, and the jury award was an
attempt by ordinary citizens to make her whole, $18.3 being the value of the
business destroyed by Mr. Blumenthal.
The lede for the story in CTMirror ran as follows:
“The
Connecticut Supreme Court Monday [8/26/13] dismissed a small company's $18.3
million defamation claim against the state that became an issue in the U.S
Senate campaign of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal in 2010.”
Connecticut’s Supreme Court,
we are told, “offered no opinion on the substance of the claims and
counter-claims” decided by the jury. The high court instead “focused on
the narrow question of whether the state, by suing the company for civil
damages, had waived the immunity against civil lawsuits generally enjoyed by
public officials and state agencies… In a unanimous opinion by Justice Flemming
L. Norcott Jr., the state's highest court concluded that sovereign immunity
protected the state in the case. It set aside the reduced $1.83 million damage
award, and dismissed all claims by Computers Plus.”
In its decision, the high
court ruled that a private person unjustly deprived of property by the state
must, before filing a suit, obtain from the state’s Office of the Claims
Commissioner an approval to sue; the decision of the claims commissioner may
then be appealed to the General Assembly. This process, which places decisions
properly made by the judicial department directly in the hands of the
legislature, is itself constitutionally questionable. One purpose of the litigatory merry go round is
to frustrate aggrieved citizens from seeking redress directly from the judicial
department. The high court ruling permitted the justices to over-leap the
findings issued by the lower courts.
Case closed, next…
For some who have paid
attention to high court decisions in which the political status of prominent
politicians lies in the justice pans, the decision of the court in this
instance is not surprising. But what are the real world consequences that
follow upon the servility of courts to the political establishment?
At a minimum, the highly
politicized decision, masquerading as a finding that turns on a process point,
is a firm indication to citizens of Connecticut
who may in the future be harmed by high-handed suit-prone attorneys
general that they cannot receive simple justice from the courts, because “the
state” is encircled by a near absolute sovereign immunity so impenetrable to
common sense and simple justice that it may only rarely be breeched -- not even
by an aggrieved woman initially sued by the state upon whom once attorney
general and now U.S. Senator Dick
Blumenthal had waged, according to a jury verdict, an unjust war in the course
of which her company had been litigated out of existence by Mr. Blumenthal.
Really, one wants to respond
with pikestaffs and pitchforks to the high court’s decision. The owner of
Computer Plus – as well as the owners of all small businesses in Connecticut –
has been told by the Supreme Court that she has no direct recourse to the
courts after the state first initiated
a suit against her.
No, instead of applying to
the courts for succor in response to a state initiated suit since determined by
a jury to be ill advised, the aggrieved and damaged owner of Computer Plus must
first apply to politicians, the initial cause of the misery and near poverty brought
upon her by ambitious, publicity hungry politicians on the make.
When apprised by an English
court that the law supposed Mr. Bumble’s wife “operated under his direction,”
Mr. Bumble, a character in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, erupted, “If the law
supposes that, the law is a ass — a idiot.”
Under the new regimen
imposed by the court, the state may invidiously sue a business; the owner of
the business then must apply for judgment to an executive administrator who
answers to the governor; should the owner wish to contest the judgment, he must
apply to the General Assembly; and should the case proceed to trial, the state attorney general – the very agency that initiated the fraudulent suit – will prosecute
the case in court.
The question before the general
public is: How would the public know if its state were an idiot?
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