Friday, November 19, 2010

If you think the justice system in the United States is screwed up...

...wait till you see what they're doing over in Ireland (where their banks are getting weaker by the day). In one of the greatest newspaper (or blog) headlines of all time, "Naked Irish Sleepwalker Wins Libel Suit", the New York Times' Robert Mackey writes:
An Irish jury awarded nearly $14 million in damages on Thursday to a man who claimed that his former employers had slandered him by insinuating that he had made improper advances to a female colleague during a business trip.
The man, Donal Kinsella, insisted that he had been sleepwalking during a trip to Mozambique in 2007 when he showed up, naked, at the door of a female colleague’s hotel room three times in one night, The Irish Times reported.
He later filed suit against the mining company that employed him at the time because it had referred to the incident in a press release explaining why he had been asked to resign from the company’s audit committee, on which the same female colleague served.
I've really never understood how juries arrive at these ridiculous amounts for monetary damages, but this one seems particularly absurd, especially given the nature of the case. But wait... there's more.
During the trial, the court heard that Mr. Kinsella had also been drinking and taking painkillers on the night in question...
The jury’s award was by far the largest ever in an Irish libel case and it prompted the judge to pause and ask the jury to “correct me if I’m mistaken,” as he read the sum aloud, according to The Daily Mail. The Mail also reported that the jury had increased the award, “because the jurors felt that the cross examination of Mr. Kinsella by the company’s lawyers was too aggressive.”
A lawyer for the company described the award as “off the Richter scale” and said that it would be appealed.
Oh, come on... now we're punishing people (and companies) for defending themselves "too aggressively" in court? Ireland, you have officially gone off the deep end.

As for Mr. Kinsella, congratulations buddy. You're the first guy in history (that I'm aware of) to get paid for doing what most of us Irish people do naturally--getting drunk and being inappropriate. Well-played, big guy; you're an inspiration to us all.


[New York Times]

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