By DAVID KITTREDGE
By David Kittredge
Imagine your grandparents returning home in a car that just received routine maintenance, such as an oil change and a tire rotation at a car dealership, when a wheel falls off the car and causes them to get into an accident resulting in injury. Upon hearing of your relatives situation, you would immediately think to sue the person that performed the work, right?
“I can’t keep up with what’s been going down.”
This situation did happen to a couple named Samuel Anaya and Doris Myricks, in Michigan, in October 2013. The couple and their lawyer sued the dealership in court and won. A Michigan law, the Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Act (MVSRA), which protects car owners from devious and, or bone-headed mechanics from charging people for work not performed or from substandard work that is performed on their vehicles, was used to argue the plaintiff’s case.
The mechanic, who worked on the couple’s car admitted in court that he had forgotten to tighten the lug nuts which hold the wheel onto the axle.
This is an open and shut case, right?
Well, the jury thought so too and awarded the plaintiffs $40,000 in damages and $70,000 for legal fees.
But, why should it have cost the couple $70,000 in legal fees to fight a seemingly open and shut case in a court of law in the first place? The accident happened six years ago and many thousands of dollars later.
“To the mating calls of lawyers in love.”
The lawyers representing the car dealership appealed the finding of the jury and the case went to an appellate court that overruled the initial decision — even though the dealership’s mechanic admitted that he was at fault. The appeals court found the MVSRA law did not actually spell out the meaning of the word “perform.”
Does this sound familiar? President Bill Clinton used a similar logic when he went on national television in the late nineties and declared: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is,’ is,” before his impeachment trial. Of course, he was a lawyer and a Rhodes Scholar, a very bright man, and with this statement he sent the legal minds into a tizzy. I can imagine a class of law students debating the idea of what is, is, for the better part of a semester as they practice their mental calisthenics and verbal gyrations.
“Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capital.”
When the persons overseeing the appeals court in Michigan questioned the meaning of the word “perform,” they came to the conclusion that performing a tire rotation did not actually include the tightening of the lug bolts. Not only were they just splitting hairs, but they went even further as their picayune minds morphed into that of aspiring nuclear physicists and they started splitting atoms. And we know what happens when atoms are split, BOOM!, whole cities are obliterated. In this instance, it was a court case and a couple’s bank account that was blown to smithereens.
“Now we’ve got all this bloom, we needn’t got the room.”
As the logic in this case become convoluted and the lawyers need to submit more legal briefs to defend the couple who were involved in the car wreck, the legal fees will multiply. When lawyers and judges distort the definition of a simple term such as “perform,” they are in fact twisting the true meaning of the word. The act of twisting the truth happens to be the actual meaning of the word wicked, which is derived from the term candle wick because the wicks are twisted before they are dipped into the wax. It is also wicked to put this couple through a multi-year court battle which is then appealed in a higher court to delay a just outcome. Hopefully, wiser minds will intervene and rectify the appeals court’s decision.
When I first came across this story, Jackson Browne’s song “Lawyers in Love” entered my head and remains there in the background as I write and think about this court case. I don’t believe Browne was merely referring to someone’s love life when he wrote the song, but that he was also alluding to the love of money and the allure of power. I have interjected some of the lines from his song throughout the column in bold and quote marks. The last bolded song line contains the word “bloom” and I don’t think he was referring to the bloom on the rose or to the bloom on a woman’s cheeks; no, the bloom he had in mind was a rapid growth of microscopic algae over covering a body of water, otherwise known as pond scum. You know, the stuff that can give you an earache or perhaps something even worse if you come in contact with it.
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