My client was in the logistics business of transporting contraband around the southeast in horse trailers loaded with big, mean horses. He told any troopers who happened to pull him over they were broncs bound for a rodeo dissuading any urge to search the trailer. His ploy worked so well he earned enough to buy himself a beautiful horse farm way out in Colleton County. The only thing he loved more than his farm was his wife. When she broke her back in a single car wreck, he took her all the way to the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans for the three-level spinal fusion surgery she needed that South Carolina doctors were too scared to perform. When she recovered from her surgery, he brought her in to see my partner, Malcolm Crosland, and me about her case. She won us over immediately, being as sweet and as country as a drop girl could be. When we’d call to talk with her about her case, her husband would try to butt in on the conversation, and she’d holler on the phone, “Shad aup! I’m talking to da lawyers.” She was just the kind of client a Colleton County jury would undoubtedly love to pieces.
Problem was by all accounts the wreck was her fault. Nobody ran her off the road and there was no mechanical breakdown. She just ran off the road and flipped over into a ditch. Fortunately for her, my partner, Malcolm, was the kind of lawyer who never gave up fighting for his clients. If you asked him for an elephant, he’d bring you a whole circus.
He somehow found a highway construction expert qualified not only to tell us what happened to cause our client’s wreck but who was responsible. His detailed report pinned the blame squarely on the paving company that left a four inch drop off on the side of the highway they’d just repaved. They were supposed to have backfilled the drop off but didn’t and his report explained how that caused our client’s wreck.
When our client drifted over to the edge of the roadway, her tire deformed and literally pulled her over the edge. When she tried to steer back onto the road surface, her tire “scrubbed” along the drop off unable to climb back up until she overcorrected to a critical angle when her tire caught and vaulted her back up onto the highway. Most often incidents of this nature cause head-on collisions but, with no oncoming traffic, our client shot all the way across the highway and rolled over into a ditch on the other side. It is a well-known and documented danger in the road construction industry as shown in the expert’s report citing peer reviewed engineering studies dating back to the Ford Model T.
We filed a negligence action against the paving company which had plenty of insurance coverage. It didn’t take long for the paving company’s lawyers to figure out they were toast on the issue of liability, so they decided to switch gears and attack our sweet client’s credibility. Their attempts proved feeble and, quite honestly, started to piss the jury off. That’s when the desperate defense lawyers got the bright idea to stoop to a new low. They called an off duty, African American police officer to testify. He testified he didn’t see the wreck but came up on it right after it happened and jumped down into the ditch where our client was hanging upside down in her car to offer help. He sure sounded like a good Samaritan but then he testified our client clutched her jewelry hanging from her neck when he stuck his head in to ask if she was all right.
In every lawyer’s practice the time will come when a pompous opposing counsel, a lying witness with an axe to grind, or just some plain old racist, sexist, or some other kind of istist, will say something that shows his or her true colors. In our case it came when the defense lawyer called the police officer he apparently had some connection with. I saw immediately what he was up to. I stopped and let the silence highlight for the jury that something important had happened. Then I asked the officer in a calm, level voice, “What inference is it you want the jury to draw from your testimony she clutched her jewelry?” It caught him off guard. He didn’t want to outright accuse our sweet client of thinking all black people were robbers for the benefit of the five African American jurors on our jury. All he could do was hem and haw around about how the jury could make of it whatever it wanted. So, I asked again and let the weasel squirm while the jury figured it out for themselves.
The defense lawyer’s witness backfired spectacularly. We got a very good verdict for our Colleton County sweetheart from our Collewton County jury. And we still get a good laugh every time one of us says, “Shad aup! I’m talking to da lawyer!”
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