Supreme Court’s Decision
The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to decide how much authority state courts should have in granting big damage awards against the creators of prescription cigarettes and drugs.
Consumer advocates declare lawsuits in state court have traditionally helped uncover product hazards, but the business community disputes that federal regulations about product safety often trump the one-case-at-a-time decisions of state court juries. One of the biggest cases of the term comes to the Supreme Court with a heartbreaking background.
When Diana Levine, a popular Vermont guitar player, sought cure for a migraine headache in 2000, she was given a drug called Phenergen, injected into an I-V tube with a syringe, a method called “IV push,” to control nausea. But the drug came in contact with an artery, severely damaging her forearm and hand, which had to be amputated a few months later. She said: “It was horrible, it was just traumatic. The drug label should have said, do not give by IV push.” A Vermont jury agreed, awarding her $6.7 million.
Wyeth, the drug maker, contends that only the Drug Administration and federal Food can decide the proper wording for drug labels. Juries think only the results of individual cases and cannot weigh all a drug’s risks and benefits. Bert Rein of Washington, DC, representing Wyeth, says: “What they don’t see are the millions of people who benefit from the use of the drug, and you’ve got to weigh the interests of both those groups of patients.”
The city of Pleasant Grove, Utah, asks the court to rule that just because the city considers the Ten Commandments historic enough to allow into its Pioneer Park a monument listing them, the city is not also obligated to admit a monument from a recently organized church called Summum.
Followers of Summum believe that before Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, he was given stone tablets containing the Seven Aphorisms – “correspondence, psychokinesis, vibration, rhythm, opposition, cause and effect, and gender” – which the Summum church proposes to list on a monument in Pioneer Park.
The city refused, declaring that the Seven Aphorisms played no role in the traditions or history of Pleasant Grove. Jay Sekulow, a lawyer representing Pleasant Grove, says: “This idea that a park is a traditional public forum, therefore anybody can put up a monument, I think is just wrong.”
But a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Summum’s followers, deciding that a city can no more pick and choose among monuments donated by private groups than it can discriminate among speakers or leafleters wanting to depict themselves in a public park.
