Cape May Court House: A Death in the Night.

by Lawrence Schiller

Driving home from a party on a cold New Jersey morning, Dr. Robert Fitzpatrick, a veterinarian, noticed a Ford Explorer in a roadside ditch. He approached the Explorer and saw a baby in the backseat and two passengers--a man and a pregnant woman--slumped in the front seat. Noticing the infant's eyes were opened, he felt the adults for signs of life. The man had a pulse, but the woman had none. Other than deflated airbags, the Explorer's inside showed no evidence of a crash with a utility pole. Investigators presumed that snow and slush made it a tragic but typical winter accident. The story might have ended there but for the decision of the male passenger, a dentist from the ironically named town of Cape May Court House, to file suit against Ford Motor Company, claiming that his wife died from a defective air bag.

Lawrence Schiller's previous books have focused on criminal trials, but in Cape May Court House, he shows how civil cases can be just as compelling. Like Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action, Schiller shows how cases are won and lost during discovery. Ford's lawyers, convinced that an air bag could not have caused the death, asked eminent pathologists to examine the autopsy reports. They believed that the dentist's wife, Tracy Thomas, died from trauma and asphyxia, a peculiar result from an air bag inflation. She had no spinal injuries, normally a telltale sign of a head-on collision. While the plaintiff's team embarked on a publicity campaign, complete with a Web site and interviews with favored reporters, Ford's lawyers quietly used discovery to uncover explosive evidence. They found that before the accident, the plaintiff had purchased expanded life insurance on his wife and carried on an affair with a married woman, later marrying her after her divorce. These revelations led Ford to suggest that Tracy Thomas did not die from a defective air bag but from strangulation.

Cape May Court House has valuable lessons for lawyers. Clients do not always tell the truth, even to their own attorneys. Schiller shows how the plaintiff's lawyers learned about their client's infidelity only after he had proclaimed his love for his lost wife in depositions and interviews. They found out about the increased life insurance policies when Ford's lawyers uncovered them. After the first round of discovery, they were forced to submit revised answers, acknowledging that their client was untruthful, or at best highly evasive, in his sworn responses and newspaper interviews. Schiller shows how the adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity isn't true for lawsuits. The plaintiff's infidelity and other behavior might well have gone overlooked had he avoided the limelight.

The products liability case in Cape May Court House is seen primarily through the defense view because the defendants provided substantial access to Schiller and the plaintiff's team did not.

In legal literature, civil lawsuits have traditionally been treated as mind-numbing disputes over who got to the green light first. A Civil Action changed that perception and Cape May Court House is a welcome addition.

Cape May Court House (366 pages) is published by Harper Collins and sells for $24.95.

David Mandell, a member of The Florida Bar, lives in Norwich, Connecticut.