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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK SOCIETY, Page 20One Smoking Gun, Then an Angry Salvo
An appeals court ousts a judge from a cigarette case for showing
bias
Nobody has clocked in as many judicial hours presiding over
tobacco litigation as Judge H. Lee Sarokin of Newark, New
Jersey. The federal district judge has sat for a decade on major
plaintiff's cases against the cigarette industry. And for five
years those companies have been trying to remove Sarokin from
those cases. Last week they succeeded. In what it termed a "most
agonizing" decision, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found
that Sarokin appeared biased against the cigarette industry. The
court cited a February opinion in which Sarokin said that
"despite some rising pretenders, the tobacco industry may be the
king of concealment and disinformation."
Tobacco-industry defendants expressed relief that Sarokin
was no longer on the case. Said Charles Wall, a lawyer for
Philip Morris: "We did not claim that he is not a good judge,
but we believed he had prejudged some important issues in the
litigation." Sarokin disagreed. Removing himself from another
tobacco case last week, the judge delivered a strong rebuke to
the court of appeals. "I fear for the independence of the
judiciary if a powerful litigant can cause the removal of a
judge for speaking the truth based upon the evidence," he wrote.
"If the standard established here had been applied to the late
Judge John Sirica, Richard Nixon might have continued as
President of the United States." More than 50 U.S. cases against
the cigarette industry are pending.