Newspaper Page Text
Belli raises devil
with errant doctors
By KENNETH R. CLARK
NEW YORK (UPI) - To the
American Medical Association,
he’s a subaltern of the devil.
To the American Bar As
sociation, he’s an omnipresent
embarrassment.
To scores of grateful clients,
whose damage claims he has
won in five and six-figure
brackets, he’s the knight-errant
who rescued them from the
cold indifference of the wealthy
and the powerful.
To himself, he’s Melvin Belli
— “King of Torts,” flouter of
conventions, baiter of judges
and, above all, arch-foe of “bad
medicine, bad prescriptions,
bad diagnosis.”
“If you hang out your shingle
you ought to be able to sue
anybody — doctors, lawyers,
tennis players or anybody
else,” he said in an interview
this week. “The answer (in
stemming the burgeoning inci
dence of malpractice suits) is
better medicine. Believe me,
there are a hell of a lot of goofs
in the medical profession. I had
it from the president of the
American College of Surgeons
some years ago that 50 per cent
of all surgery is unnecessary
and dangerous. A great number
of doctors just aren’t fit to
practice.”
Doctors striking in California
to protest rising malpractice
insurance rates well might
finger Belli as the one man
who, beyond anyone else, has
singlehandedly sent the rates
soaring. Belli gleefully bows to
the charge, but he says he has
a solution for the malpractice
lawsuit problem too, if only the
medical profession would listen
to him.
“Years ago you could never
get one doctor to testify against
another one,” he said. “We
broke that conspiracy of
silence, and now the doctors
themselves have got to clean up
their act if they want to avoid
malpractice charges. First,
we’ve got to weed out the bad
doctors through doctors’ com
mittees. Then we’ve got to go
to the insurance companies and
find out just how much money
they actually lose on premiums
and how much they’ve lost in
the stock market.”
Belli admitted that many
malpractice suits are the result
of “untoward events,” rather
than incompetency on the part
of the doctor, and he proposed
establishment of a fund to pay
damages without litigation to
claimants in obvious cases.
“I’d have every patient with
a sls doctor bill put up $1 extra
for the fund,” he said. “Then it
could be used to settle claims
of obvious error. A judge or a
doctors’ committee could order
such payments without the
claimant having to go to court.
That wouldn’t end the malprac
tice remedy, but it would funnel
off an awful lot of cases.”
Belli said he has proposed his
brainchild to doctors, but with
little success.
“Just because Belli suggested
it, they want no part of it,” he
said. “They think I don’t like
them. I have nothing against
doctors. I’ll even go to one if
I’m sick... reluctantly.”
Belli’s record speaks elo
quently for the mistrust. In
more than 30 years in the
courtroom, stunning juries with
his always flamboyant and
frequently spectacular left hook
of “demonstrative evidence,”
Belli has wrested damages
averaging in excess of $1
million a year from giant
corporations and errant physi
cians. Malpractice suits are his
specialty, and medical ter
minology rolls off his tongue as
readily as does lawbook Latin.
To crack the mystique of the
doctor as the always dedicated
and compassionate font of all
wisdom, Belli has resorted to
demonstrative evidence tech
niques that, to more staid
members of his profession,
smack more of the circus than
of the courtroom. But if they
fail to impress judges and his
fellow lawyers, they have had
noticeable impact on juries —
and it is the juries which bring
in the awards for his aggrieved
clients.
Belli chuckled as he recalled
his favorite inning with demon
strative evidence.
His client was suing a plastic
surgeon for botchwork which
had left her breast a mass of
scar tissue. To illustrate his
point, Belli took the woman into
the judge’s chambers, asked
her to disrobe, then led the
jurors in one by one to view the
damage for themselves.
“It was the most dramatic
thing I think I’ve ever seen,”
he said. “Her face was red and
she was standing against a
white sheet. She had her head
bowed and the tears were
falling down across her breast
... washing the scars. The jury
gave her $115,000.”
The tactics win cases, but
they frequently have gotten
Belli on the carpet with judges
too —a carpet the American
Bar Association vainly has
tried to yank out from under
him in the form of censure or
disbarment because of his
predilection for treating oppos
ing attorneys and judges alike
to the finely honed edge of his
tongue.
Belli is unintimidated.
"One thing I think young
lawyers should learn is ‘don’t
try a case on your knees,”’ he
said. “I tell them, ‘if you can’t
stand up to the judge ... and
socially and carefully argue
back, you don’t belong in the
courtroom. If you’re scared to
talk to him, you’d better let
someone in there who isn’t.’”
“Young lawyers” are Belli’s
favorite people — the ones who
keep his faith in mankind and
the American court system
blazing as brightly as the
brilliant red lining he favors for.
his sport coats.
“They don’t give a damn
about the establishment, the
banks, the insurance companies
or the American Bar Associa
tion,” he said. “They’re not
interested in making a bundle
of money. They’re concerned
for their fellow man. These
young ones, and the goodness
that’s in them, came up out of
the hippie movement.
“The idealistic improvement
in the law is that all these
young fellows are interested in
helping the guy who up to now
wasn’t aware of his rights or
economically wasn’t situated so
he could preserve his rights.
When you get that, then you
bring equal protection of the
law and due process to
everybody, and I haven’t seen
any such trend in France or
England.”
If Belli is entranced by what
the hippie movement produced
in young turks at law, however,
he is equally disenchanted with
his leading activist colleague,
William Kunstler and “all his
talk of revolution.”
“We don’t need a revolution,”
he said. “We need a practical
revolution where the young
fellows get out and help the
people who can’t pay them the
big fees, and we’re getting that,
but for Kunstler to come out
and say we need a revolution
because the law’s no good —
that’s a crock. He doesn’t know
the law.”
Belli admits the American
court system has its flaws, and
that it is severely overloaded,
but he’s ready to do battle with
doomsayers who call for drastic
changes as a corrective measu
re.
“We’re dealing basically with
human beings and as long as
you have human beings, you’re
not going to have computerized
objective justice,” he said. “As
long as you have human beings,
you’re going to have perjury
and you’re going to have a
crooked judge here and there —
but a crooked judge is very,
very very rare.”
Perjury is not so rare.
There’s more perjury than the
layman really realizes. A
lawyer can set a witness up
and tip him off through
questioning what he should say
— truthfully or otherwise. That
kind of kid glove perjury is
rampant. You can’t take it out,
dealing with human beings ...
but you can’t throw the whole
system out just because you see
this exemplification of human
nature.”
To Belli, freedom of the press
is the “cornerstone,” both of
the courts and of democracy —
even ahead of the rights of the
individual — and he opposes
any judicial “gag” of reporters
covering a trial.
“If you want to destroy
democracy,” he said, “you put
all the lawyers in jail and
prevent the newspapers from
publishing and you’ve done it.”
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Page 13
— Griffin Daily News Thursday, February 26, 1976