With all the talk about the new proposed illegal Philly gun ordinances. and wanting to hit back at CeaseFire PA, I found an interesting write up that outlines and highlights the late 90's Anti Gun Groups legal strategies to use contigent attorneys to co erce and co opt local elected officials. Thought it might be interesting to start connecting the dots between the Executive Board of CeaseFire PA and the City of Philadelphia. Im betting there's all sorts of conflict of interest relationships going on. Remember we can use smear campaign tactics just like they can. While there is an inherant morality in always trying to adhere to the high road, that moral superiority quickly becomes worthless when your enemy is fighting the War with Flamethrowers and you stick to a water pistol.I say its time to start fighting these assholes with their own tactics and peel back the layers of corruption and expose them.

Article follows.


http://www.i2i.org/main/article.php?article_id=520



III. Contingent Fee Government Lawsuits are Invented and Coordinated by Private Interests who then Solicit Government Officials to Serve as Nominal Plaintiffs.


A long article in The American Lawyer magazine explains how the recent wave of anti-gun lawsuits was invented by an anti-gun group, then taken up as a business enterprise by aggressive contingent fee lawyers. (Long Shot at Gun Tort Dollars, by Douglas McCollam, June 1, 1999.)



Dennis Henigan is the lead attorney for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, which is the legal arm of Sarah Bradys group Handgun Control, Inc. At a breakfast meeting in Washington, Henigan convinced contingent fee attorney Wendell Gauthier to take the lead on anti-gun government lawsuits.



New Orleans lawyer Gauthier is head of the Castano Group, a consortium of sixty contingent fee firms that worked on the tobacco cases. Gauthier convinced many of these law firms to sign up for anti-gun litigation, as the sequel to the their tobacco cases.



The contingent fee lawyers then traveled the country to solicit mayors to serve as plaintiffs. New Orleans, Cincinnati, Newark, and Cleveland are among those who signed on to the Gauthier/Castano solicitations. These [mayors] have been hoodwinked by the plaintiffs bar into thinking these suits are an easy source of revenue, charges Paul Jannuzzo, general counsel of Glock, Inc., a major handgun manufacturer.



Although the lawsuits are premised on very dubious legal theories, and have been dismissed in many courts, Gauthier explains that in his line of work, he doesnt have to win, he only has to settle. Of course Castano would take a percentage of any money allocated to the cities under any settlement agreements.



One of the factors that can coerce settlements is that the entire gun industry, put together, would not make a single Fortune 500 companies. Thus, the pretrial discovery litigation expenses from the 30 different lawsuits orchestrated by the anti-gun groups can be crippling, even if the plaintiffs never win a single case. Gauthier and his contingent fee government contract lawyers, believe that there is nothing like a good discovery battle to make defendants reach for their wallets.



The October 1999 issue of Reason magazine fills in the details of the cynical strategy of blackmail through frivolous litigation. (Big Guns, by Walter Olson.):



whatever possessed the mayors to dream up these suits? They weren't the ones who dreamed them up. As the June American Lawyer recounts in detail, the gun litigation got under way when a bunch of the nation's richest trial lawyers began looking for new worlds to conquer after the successful mugging of the tobacco industry. Following a December pow-wow in Chicago to get their story straight, they began flying around the country to pitch their services to mayors and city attorneys. Under the terms of contingency fee agreements with the cities, they stand to pocket as much as 30 percent of any trial winnings.



the idea is to create as much uncertainty as possible, capitalizing on the difficulty of defending against many different theories in many different places at once, all this aside from the irreducible random factor in all litigation. [We] have the resources to start a war instead of taking little potshots, trial lawyer John Coale[1] told The New Yorker's Boyer. Well, weve started a war. Attorney Dennis Henigan of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence said what he's after is to create a "credible threat of liability....The more cities that file, the greater is the threat. So what you really want is a diversity of cases in lots of different regions, lots of different courts to create the greatest threat of liability." You might call this a "spaghetti strategy": Throw a potful against the wall and see if any strands stick. You might also compare it with what the Irish Republican Army said after its Brighton hotel bombing failed to assassinate Margaret Thatcher: "We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky every time."


I know the Federal Law bars lawsuits against manufacturer's like is discussed in the article. But I just recently saw reports that as recently as December 2009 the SCOTUS tossed out yet another manufacturer liability lawsuit brought by the Brady Bunch in 2009 , Adames v Beretta USA. So even thought theres a clear Federal Law prohibiting these suits , the Brady Bunch is still pursuing them anyway.

Personally, I dont think their thinking very clearly about this tactic, because everytime they have one tossed it just creates a bigger list of cases they've lost.


I know Philly's proposed ordinances arent the same thing as these manufacturer liability suits, but still think the article above gives a valuable insight into the Anti's strategy and Im convinced some digging will uncover connections between Philly Officials and CeaseFire PA that they would rather remain buried.



Thoughts ?