The Runaway Jury Read Online Free Page A

product liability, all had made millions collecting on breast implants, Dalkon Shields, and asbestos. Now they met several times a year and plotted ways to mine the mother lode of American torts. No legally manufactured product in the history of the world had killed as many people as the cigarette. And their makers had pockets so deep the money had mildewed.
    Rohr put up the first million, and was eventually joined by seven others. With no effort, the group quickly recruited help from the Tobacco Task Force, the Coalition for a Smoke Free World, and the Tobacco Liability Fund, plus a handful of other consumer groups and industry watchdogs. A plaintiff’s trial council was organized, not surprisingly with Wendall Rohr as the chairman and designated point man in the courtroom. Amid as much fanfare as it could generate, Rohr’s group had filed suit four years earlier in the Circuit Court of Harrison County, Mississippi.
    According to Fitch’s research, the Wood case against Pynex was the fifty-fifth of its kind. Thirty-six had been dismissed for a multitude of reasons. Sixteen had gone to trial and ended with verdicts in favor of the tobacco companies. Two had ended in mistrials. None had been settled. Not one penny had ever been paid to a plaintiff in a cigarette case.
    According to Rohr’s theory, none of the other fifty-four had been pushed by so formidable a plaintiff’s group. Never had the plaintiff been represented by lawyers with enough money to level the playing field.
    Fitch would admit this.
    Rohr’s long-term strategy was simple, and brilliant. There were a hundred million smokers out there, not all with lung cancer but certainly a sufficient number to keep him busy until retirement. Win the first one, then sit back and wait for the stampede. Every main street ham-and-egger with a grieving widow would be calling with lung cancer cases. Rohr and his group could pick and choose.
    He operated from a suite of offices which took the top three floors of an old bank building not far from the courthouse. Late Friday night, he opened the door to a dark room and stood along the back wall as Jonathan Kotlack from San Diego operated the projector. Kotlack was in charge of jury research and selection, though Rohr would do most of the questioning. The long table in the center of the room was littered with coffee cups and wadded paper. The people around the table watched bleary-eyed as another face flashed against the wall.
    Nelle Robert (pronounced Roh-bair), age forty-six, divorced, once raped, works as a bank teller, doesn’t smoke, very overweight and thus disqualifiedunder Rohr’s philosophy of jury selection. Never take fat women. He didn’t care what the jury experts would tell him. He didn’t care what Kotlack thought. Rohr never took fat women. Especially single ones. They tended to be tightfisted and unsympathetic.
    He had the names and faces memorized, and he couldn’t take any more. He had studied these people until he was sick of them. He eased from the room, rubbed his eyes in the hallway, and walked down the stairs of his opulent offices to the conference room, where the Documents Committee was busy organizing thousands of papers under the supervision of André Durond from New Orleans. At this moment, at almost ten o’clock on Friday night, more than forty people were hard at work in the law offices of Wendall H. Rohr.
    He spoke to Durond as they watched the paralegals for a few minutes. He left the room and headed for the next with a quicker pace now. The adrenaline was pumping.
    The tobacco lawyers were down the street working just as hard.
    Nothing rivaled the thrill of big-time litigation.

Three
    T he main courtroom of the Biloxi courthouse was on the second floor, up the tiled staircase to an atrium where sunlight flooded in. A fresh coat of white paint had just been applied to the walls, and the floors gleamed with new wax.
    By eight Monday a crowd was already gathering in the atrium outside the