Justice is served

IS IT safe now to assume that this whole case, misadventure and general money grab directed at Johnson & Johnson’s assets is over? If this lawsuit stops with the state’s Supreme Court, where it now should, then the answer is yes.

Let’s hope that’s so, and observers can comment on the case’s outcome last week without fear of prejudicing a jury or in any other way getting in the way of the massive wheels of the law, which grind slowly but not always exceedingly fine. If this case really is concluded, then let’s say it loud and clear:

One-point-two-billion dollars. That’s not a fine. That’s a small country’s defense budget. But that was indeed the the size of the fine handed down by an Arkansas court-specifically, the one presided over by the Hon. Tim Fox, a circuit court judge in Pulaski County.

Having been given the judge’s instructions about what it could decide and not decide, an Arkansas jury found that Johnson & Johnson, through a subsidiary named Janssen Pharmaceuticals, had put patients in danger with a drug called Risperdal.

The innocent jurors, who were only following the judge’s misbegotten instructions about the law as best they could, found patients were improperly exposed to the side effects of the antipsychotic drug. So they decided that the company had violated the state’s Medicaid fraud law. And the judge, Tim Fox, handed out one of the largest fines in Arkansas history.

But wait a minute: Doesn’t that Medicaid fraud law apply to healthcare facilities rather than in this case? Indeed, it does, and that’s just what the state’s Supreme Court ruled. Unanimously. To sum up its reaction when confronted by this decision from the lower court: “Huh?”

Or put it in the words of a clearer writer on the law, namely Her Honor Karen Baker of the state’s highest court, Janssen Pharmaceuticals “is indisputably not a healthcare facility . . . .” As usual, you’ll find her facts impeccable. And her decision clear, crisp, and to thepoint. Would that more American editorials were such.

Once again, Justice Baker proves to be a beacon of light in the state’s judiciary. And the Hon. Tim Fox doesn’t.

Result: A one-point-two-billion dollar fine reversed.

It was always a stretch, more than a stretch, to apply this particular law to this particular case. What it wound up looking like was a clear and present attempt to shake down a company to replenish the state’s own coffers.

Here’s hoping the attorney general and his staff will just accept the court’s decision and go on. They’ve done enough, more than enough, to embarrass themselves. And the state of Arkansas.