A Civil Action.docx

A civil action

The main character is Jan Schlichtmann (John Trovolta), a young and cocky attorney belonging in a relatively small three lawyer law firm. The firm is primarily focused on personal injury cases or tort cases. He reluctantly accept and represent a class action suit that involves death of children due to leukemia in the town of woburn which were supposedly due to contaminated water. They claim that a nearby tannery might be dumping chemicals (trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent) into the nearby river. They accepted the case reluctantly since the case seemed unprofitable until he learned of factories near to the river. One is a tannery of J Riley Corporation which is a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods and the other is W.R. Grace and Company.

Beatrice Foods is represented by William Cheeseman (Bruce Norris) and the other company by Jerry Facher (Robert Duvall). The judge was Walter J. Skinner (John Lithgow) and the trial case ends with a dismissal for Beatrice Foods and a forced settlement for Grace due to a key ruling. They are the defendants.

It is apparent that their firm was small compared the firms employed by the corporations and since they themselves were the one financing the case and that the case was so complex that the entire firm had no time to accept other cases, It led to all of the partners and their financial manager, James Gordon (William H. Macy), to go bankrupt and end their partnership. All throughout the movie, the defendants were offering settlements which the main character refused to accept because he wanted to win the case because he got emotionally invested with the plights of the grieving families, Anne Anderson (Kathleen Quinlan). This is despite the main character’s monologue which state that almost all civil actions agree to settle.

This seems to be the most important and relevant to our subject since simple testimonies and depositions lang ang nangyari. Basically, the splitting of the trial between proving the dumping and it would only proceed to presenting the testimony of the families for damages if na prove yung dumping since until na prove then their testimony would only be collateral and irrelevant to the dumping itself.

The Key Ruling against the plaintiff is this. Facher asserts that the testimonies of the families of the deceased should not be allowed in court unless the dumping of the solvent by the said companies are proven by preponderance of evidence. That the testimony would not be

relevant and is merely collaterel unless the dumping is proven and it may even be said that the testimony of a parent regarding his dead child could have single handedly caused them to win since it tends to excite and prejudice a judge and especially the jurors. So the judge made the ruling that testimony of the family would proceed only against defendants proven by preponderance of evidence to have dumped the solvent improperly.

Expert Witness - They had presented Dr. George Pinder (Stephen Fry) and his team of geologists to prove that the dumping of the chemicals on land and the river could have caused them to contaminate the town’s wells.

Beatrice Foods - There was no evidence found of dumping chemicals during the trial so the case was dismissed against them. No current employee saw the dumping.

W. R. Grace and Company - Although every employee would not talk, a former employee testified to the dumping but there was no other evidence to corroborate and so a settlement was forced to stop the firm’s losses.

The firm’s losses caused the firm to dissolved and the main character to declare bankruptcy. Later on, he found a witness that incriminates J. Riley Corporation and their parent corporation but due to his bankruptcy he was forced to just send a later to the Environmental Protection Agency which later pursued the case and won. The witness was someone who was hired to specifically clean up and dump the solvents.

It would seem that the downfall of the main character is relying on the testimony of the family which is a collateral fact that does not fall under the exception so he lost when the older opposing counsel insisted that the said testimony not be presented against the company unless the jury finds that they had dumped the chemicals by preponderance of evidence. He had no evidence that proved the ultimate facts of the case sufficiently. It would even seem na common tactic niya yon since in the opening scene’s monologue, he said that a dead child is worth less than an injured man and so on.

Based on a true story.