Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Products Liability Meets Criminal Law
It’s not often that products liability concepts intersect with criminal law. Such was the case in South Carolina last week, when Circuit Judge Roger Young of Charleston, in a 41-page order [PDF], threw out the conviction and granted a new trial to a young man whose defense team “did not appreciate how unlikely the ‘Zoloft defense’ would result in an acquittal.” As a result of that failure, the judge held, the defense team did not seriously pursue negotiations for a plea deal.
The case at issue is one that has drawn national media attention. Christopher Pittman of Chester, South Carolina, was just 12 years old when he reportedly shot his grandparents as they slept in their home, set their house on fire, and fled the scene in their SUV. The nearly three-week murder trial was moved to Charleston County because of the extensive publicity the case had garnered in the Upstate. Pittman was tried as an adult at age 15, was found guilty, and was sentenced to 30 years in the South Carolina Department of Corrections. He lost his appeals to the South Carolina and U.S. Supreme Courts.
For his criminal trial, Pittman’s defense team was reportedly comprised not of criminal defense attorneys, but of “lawyers who specialized in suing pharmaceutical companies.” They blamed the murders on the prescribed anti-depressant Zoloft, saying it clouded Pittman’s sense of right and wrong. Prosecutors argued in response that the premeditated nature of the murders, along with the fact that Pittman subsequently burned his grandparents’ home and thus knew the killings were wrong, discounted the defense’s Zoloft theory. The jury agreed, refusing to buy the defense team’s argument that Zoloft somehow made Pittman commit the murders. According to a 2008 article in The New York Times, Pfizer Inc., the maker of Zoloft, called the case “tragic” but said, “Zoloft didn’t cause his problems, nor did the medication drive him to commit murder.”
In his recent order, Judge Young chastised the defense team’s strategy, noting that the team, led by a civil attorney Andy Vickery, seemed more interested in putting Zoloft on trial than in doing what was best for the defendant. “After Vickery’s team took over the media attention grew exponentially greater,” Judge Young wrote, “in large part because the defense team cultivated it in order to draw attention to the side effects of SSRI (antidepressant) drugs such as Zoloft.”
Interesting, reportedly one year after Pittman’s trial, the FDA began requiring Zoloft and other antidepressants to carry “black box” warnings, the government’s strongest warning short of a total ban, about the increased risk of suicidal behavior in children. It does not, however, extend the warning to include potential homicidal risks.
