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Beaumont, Texas Personal Injury Law Blog - Ken Lewis

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Slippery Slope of Integrity

The 18-year-old boy was very frustrated because he could hardly make himself understood. He was a bundle of nerves as we prepared for his deposition in the case against the company that had supplied a defective high-powered hydroblasting gun to the worksite where he was working hard 12-hour days 7 days a week. That defective gun had not met OSHA or industry standards because it was short enough that if the combination of high pressure kickback and the water that inevitably covered the user caused it to slip for even a second, the end of the barrel could turn to face the user while his finger still kept the trigger depressed. That is exactly what happened to this young man in the 7th hour of a workday. The powerful stream of water used to cut away encrusted and hardened gunk from the inside of units at the chemical plant could actually cut through a cinder block. When the end leapt to his throat, it blasted a hole just under his chin, severing his tongue at its base and damaging the roof of his mouth and his face. Huge doses of medication were necessary to calm him enough to even get him to the operating room because of the excruciating pain. He would never regain normal speech.

He wanted me to tell him what to say if they asked him if he used drugs on the day of the accident. My answer was simple: Answer any question you are asked truthfully. You will be under oath and have sworn to tell the truth.

You see, a friend had given him one tablet of Valium at lunch because both the co-worker and this young were really stressed out from the hot, endless hard work. The deposition went well for several hours. The young man handled all the questions with ease. He was neither defensive nor too malleable. He described the accident and how he came to be using the short gun in detail. He was very believable as he described the problems caused by his injuries and his work at rehabilitation. We were getting close to the end of the desposition and it appeared there were going to be no questions about any drug use. I knew that no one had any reason to suspect drug involvement. The opposing lawyer turned to a long list of questions copied from a reference book, reading through them as fast as he could, always getting a response of "No". When he asked "Did you use any illegal drugs that day?," he had already read two more questions before he realized the young man had said: "Yes." When he realized it, he stopped and asked: "Did you say you had used illegal drugs that day?" The opposing lawyer worked through the whole story and the young man candidly answered every question. Because he told the truth, that irrelevant drug use became a central part of the case, with competing experts discussing the impact or lack of impact of such a small dose of Valium on an 18-year-old worker. Certainly, the Valium use resulted in an eventual settlement during trial for less than would have otherwise been the case.

Should I as a lawyer have counseled the young man to answer "no" to the drug question because no one but he and I would ever know? Of course not--for a lot of reasons. First, to find any rationale for not telling the exact truth would have been perjury. Second, to counsel him to be dishonest would violate the ethical requirements of the Code of Professional Responsibility that lawyers are sworn to follow. Third, the civil justice system is based on the presumption that parties and lawyers will take the facts as they find them and apply the law and their arguments to actual facts to allow judges and juries to reach fair results. More importantly, integrity and honor are like the steep, slippery shore of a rocky island in a stormy sea: Once you fall off that island's shore, it is almost impossible to regain that shore. No lawyer should help a client abandon that integrity or honor. More importantly, no lawyer should so easily give up integrity and honor.

Would you be able to trust a lawyer who advised you to be untruthful? Would you trust a lawyer who lied for you? If a lawyer advised you to lie or lied for you, would you expect that lawyer to be truthful with you? That rocky island of integrity matters in life and in law.

God Bless!

posted by Ken Lewis at 3:36 PM