WARNING: This site deals only with the corporate corruption of science, and makes no inference about the motives or activities of individuals involved.
    There are many reasons why individuals become embroiled in corporate corruption activities - from political zealotry to over-enthusiastic activism; from gullibility to greed.
    Please read the OVERVIEW carefully, and make up your own mind.

OPINION ONLY

The Haimes's case was the subject of the book 'Judith' written by her husband Allen Haimes. Judith Haimes now lives with her husband in Florida and writes a syndicated newspaper column on grieving.

Judith Richardson Haimes, from Philadelphia, PA,, worked as a psychic in Newark, Delaware, until an allergic reaction to the iodine tracer injected for a CAT scan allegedly disabled her. She sued Temple University Hospital and was initially awarded over $600,000 by a sympatheic jury for pain, suffering and loss of income. This award was later overturned on appeal.

The case is often cited in discussions of frivolous lawsuits and tort reform with the facts often grossly misrepresented. Contrary to popular belief, Haimes never claimed that a CAT scan had caused her to lose her psychic powers: in fact, the CAT scan never took place. Haimes only claimed that the headaches resulting from her allergic reaction to the injected dye prevented her from enjoying live, and also from earning a living as a psychic. She was, in fact, a regional celebrity then, as she is today.

According to one source:

Haimes previously earned a lucrative living by offering sessions in which she ostensibly read individual's auras, offering them medical as well as personal advice. She gained a reputation following an article in Philadelphia magazine that described seances she conducted at a wealthy Chestnut Hill patron's house.

Seer Judith Haimes startles guests with her revelations at a recent seance. How could she have possibly known about the breast cancer or the sailors on a doomed ship?

No one told her that Lloyd's sister had had a mastectomy in 1980 and had died eight years later when the cancer resurfaced. And no one told her that Sylvia's father was assigned to the USS Quincy, though not on board, when it was sunk by the Japanese on Aug. 18, 1942, in the battle for Guadalcanal.

Yet she knew. Or seemed to.

Maybe Judith Richardson Haimes is as psychic as she claims. Lloyd and Sylvia were certainly unnerved by her revelations at a recent seance at Baleroy, the 30-room mansion in Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill that George Gordon Meade Easby calls home. Easby, septuagenarian descendant of so many signers of the Declaration of Independence that he can't remember them all, is also related to the Walns, the Stevensons, the Biddles, the Larges and Lord knows who else. He insists that his magnificent, antiques-filled home is haunted by some of those long-gone relatives and by his mother, Henrietta Meade Large Easby, who died in 1961.

Recently, Haimes was getting ``vibes'' in Florida about her friend Easby and ...etc (Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

Some key documents

1976 Sep: A physician recommended that the professional psychic, Judith Haimes consult an ear, nose and throat specialist for a suspected tumor. [She had a history of skin tumors; 14 to 15 of these had needed to be removed] The specialist refered her for a CAT scan.

1976 Sep 7: At the Temple University Hospital, Haimes told the radiologist that in previous occasions she had had reactions of nausea, vomiting, hives and difficulties breathing from the injected dye/medium use in CAT scans. In view of this, the attending radiologist decided to initially use only a test amount, and, as a precaution, she set up an invtravenous line so that counter-acting drugs could be quickly administered if a reaction occurred.

    Haines had a bad reaction to the first test amount (two drops), so the doctor waited 5 to 7 minutes before administering another five to seven drops of the dye.

    The second test amount triggered an immediate strong reaction with difficulties breathing, tightness of the throat, pain, nausea, vomiting, hives and welts, and loss of bladder control. Epinphrin and benadryl were immediately administered, and the patient was observed for the next 15 to 20 minutes.

    She remained within the hospital for another couple of hours, but in the afternoon she was released to return home.

    She suffered vomiting, nausea and headaches for the next 48 hours and had welts on her body for three days and hives which continued for two-to-three weeks. Headaches and nausea continued to plague her.

    Because of continuing 'excrucuating' headaches, she was unable to maintain her business as a psychic — and she blamed herself for her son's death in an automobile accident, because she believed she would have forseen the accident if she had been well and still had her psychic powers.

    Medical experts agreed that she had suffered a real 'anti-genetobody reaction and anaphylactic stages" to the dye. However they also testified that there was no negligence involved.

1980: Haimes was entombed in her own private grief over the loss of her 16-year-old son Michael, who was killed in a car crash in 1980.

1986 Mar 27: (From the 1998 Fall article An Oil Strike in Hell: Contemporary Legends About the Civil Justice System. by Marc Galanter, University of Wisconsin. He says:

On March 27, 1986, a civil jury in Philadelphia deliberated on the medical malpractice claim of Judith Haimes, who had experienced an allergic reaction to the dye injected during a CAT scan examination ten years earlier.

    In addition to the immediate injuries, she contended that she later experienced severe recurring headaches that prevented her from using her psychic powers and forced her to abandon her business as a spiritual advisor. Three police officers testified that she had helped them solve crimes with her psychic powers.

    Because she had not shown that the headaches were the result of the allergic reaction, Judge Leon Katz instructed the jury not to consider her claims about her psychic powers and loss of business, but to "consider only the damages related to the immediate allergic reaction, which included nausea, welts and hives."

    Nevertheless, the eight person jury, after deliberating for 45 minutes, awarded her $988,000 ($600,000 for her injuries and $388,000 in pre-judgment interest), and the defendant moved to set aside the verdict.

    The case immediately became a poster child for tort reform, attracting wide media coverage and word-of-mouth circulation. A few days after the verdict (while the motion to set it aside was pending), The Washington Post editorialized on the need for liability reform and observed that "jury awards such as the one for the Philadelphia psychic that shock the public...aid the cause of the reformers.

• It was essentially a medical malpractice claim.
• It was now ten years since the hospital accident — there had been a decade of legal stalling and refusal to settle the case.
• The claim was over the allergic reaction to dye injected; not to the CAT scan
• She had suffered immediate and obvious injuries, seen by many hospital staff.
• She had been released from hospital while still suffering these reactions.
• She contended that later she experience severe recurring headaches and nausea
  • These prevented her using her psychic powers and forced abandonment of her business as spiritual advisor.
  • Three police officers testified she had helped them solve crimes. But
  • the Judge instructed the jury not to consider psychic allegations, since she couldn't show that the allergic reactions caused the headaches.
• The jury was told to consider only the damage related to the immediate allergic reaction, which included nausea, welts, and hives.
  • Any long-term effects were supposed to be ignored.
• The jury of eight deliberated for 45 mins and awarded her $600,000 for her injuries.
  • interest over the 10 years boosted this by $388,000.

[Despite being instructed by the Judge, the jury may well have been persuaded to consider the long-term headaches and nausea — without necessarily accepting the psychic powers claim]

1986 Apr 1: /E A few days after the verdict (while the motion to set aside was still pending before Judge Katz) the Washington Post editorialized on the need for liability reform and observed that: "jury awards such as the one for the Philadelphia psychic that shock the public [] aid the cause of the reformers."

1986 Aug 7: Four and a half months later, finding that the jury had either disregarded his instructions or made an award that was "grossly excessive," Judge Katz set aside the $988,000 award and granted the defendant's request for a new trial. The case was transferred to another judge for a second trial. [Marc Galanter]

    The full court-released details of the first Haimes v Temple University Hospital trial is here.

1986 Aug 8: UPI picked up the story and carried it in a simplistic form as:

A woman who blamed an advanced X-ray test for loss of her psychic powers has been awarded more than $1 million by a jury, a hospital attorney said today ....

[This UPI story probably triggered ATRA's interest in promoting it as an example of the need for tort-reform]

1986 Aug 15: /E An article by Craig Vetter, "Psychic Whiplash", in Playboy ran with a "grapeline version" which explained that

"a psychic had had a brain tumor removed and claimed that after the operation, she suffered headaches so severe that she could no longer make contact with the spirits. She sued the doctor; won $1,000,000.

How about the psychic? She went in for a treatment that involved a beam of radiation trained on her head. The beam was supposed to be on for 20 seconds, but the technician made a mistake and left in for 20 minutes. Not only was her skin burned but parts of her brain were, too.

1987 Apr: /E Ronald Reagan used the Haines case as an example of litigation gone mad.

A year after the suit, President Reagan, during a speech to the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, cited the case stating,

"well, a new trial was ordered in that case, but the excesses of the courts have taken their toll. As a result, in some parts of the country, women haven't been able to find doctors to deliver their babies, and other medical services have become scarce and more expensive."

According to Reagan's version and later adaptations of it, an outrageous claim led to the use of underhanded tactics like the use of so-called "experts," which led to an outrageous award for damages.

    As Reagan summed up the moral of the story, such litigation disables the productive parts of American society because of the associated costs driven up by the threat of litigation.

    The reality is that the tort system suffers from what law professor Richard Abel characterized as a chronic "crisis of underclaiming."

    Indeed, as Galanter's research shows, the rates of claiming, with the exception of car-related injuries, are low, and potential claims frequently are not pursued. Pertinent to this particular exaggeration by Reagan, a Harvard study of medical malpractice in New York estimated that "eight times as many patients suffered an injury from negligence as filed a malpractice claim in New York State."

    Reagan's psychic and the CAT scan legend about rampant medical malpractice was but one in a long line of inaccurate depictions of the civil justice system, including other areas of law, such as employment discrimination claiming.

1987 Apr 1: A year after the verdict, President Reagan, addressing the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, followed a joke about a hypochondriac with the observation that

"Sometimes it seems as though the courts are ready to award damages even to that man [the hypochondriac].

    Last year a jury awarded one woman a million dollars in damages. She'd claimed that a CAT scan had destroyed her psychic powers. [Laughter] Well, recently a new trial was ordered in that case, but the excesses of the courts have taken their toll. As a result, in some parts of the country, women haven't been able to find doctors to deliver their babies, and other medical services have become scarce and more expensive."

1989 Jan 3: After some preliminary skirmishing about the qualifications of the medical expert who had testified at the first trial regarding administration of the dye, the case went to trial on January 3, 1989. [Marc Galanter]

    Reversing the previous ruling, Judge Bernard Goodheart decided that the proffered expert did not qualify as an expert. Since the plaintiff had no other experts, she was non-suited. [Marc Galanter]

1990 /E: The [Bush I] President's Council on Competitiveness [Actually run by Dan Quayle, Wayne Valis and a group of industry executives] used an edited version of the story — but failed to mention the reversal of the case by Judge Goodheart, and concluded with the statement that, "...stories such as this are becoming almost commonplace ...."

    [Prof Marc] Galanter observes that Quayle's Council

"transforms a cautionary tale of something bizarre that almost happened, into a report of something typical and prevalent. Liberated from its anti-climactic ending, the tale of the psychic and the CAT-scan is free to occupy its rightful place in the canon of tort horror stories."

1990: The same ingredient in the zeitgeist must have affected the Philadelphia jury described by journalist Walter Olson [of the Manhattan Institute] in his book, The Litigation Explosion.

The jury awarded $986,000 in 1986 to Judith Haimes, a psychic who was said to be on good terms with John Milton (1608-1674). Haimes sued her doctor and a hospital, alleging that she suffered an allergic reaction and intense headaches from a dye used in a 1976 CAT scan and, as a consequence, could not use her psychic powers.

    Paradise lost. The judge set aside the award; the case ground on until it was dismissed on appeal last February.

1991: Various other mentions:

• Walter K Olson's [Huber's associate at the Manhattan Institute] version of the story in his book "Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit."

  Judge Leon Katz ordered the jury to disregard the psychic-damages claim, but after 45 minutes of deliberation it came back with an award of $986,000. Over the strenuous objections of Ms Haimes's lawyer, Judge Katz ordered a new trial, declaring the verdict "grossly excessive". four years later the ligitation was still dragging on.

  
  
• Charles J Sykes, in A Nation of Vicitms (1992) dropped the new trial statement entirely .

1991 /E: Even those Internet versions which seek to correct the urban myths get most of the claims wrong. Examples below:

Judith Haimes, a self-proclaimed psychic, was awarded close to $1 million by a Philadelphia jury on March 1986 after she said that a CAT scan at Temple University Hospital made her lose her psychic abilities. [She never had a CAT scan.]

    But, still ... loss of psychic powers? [Her claim was for the debilitating effects of headaches, nausea, etc. which stopped her from working. No one ever questions this.]

    Of course not. And the fact is that the claim for loss of her psychic powers was thrown out. [This claim was simply not considered as provable by the judge] The claim for the migraine headaches and specific neurological deficits she'd been suffering and would continue to suffer for the rest of her life were upheld, though.

Yes, I once looked up Judith Haimes v. Temple Univiersity Hospital where a Delaware psychic / aura reader was awarded almost a million dollars damages after having a CAT scan at Temple Hospital. [No CAT scan]

The real story is that Haimes did have an allergic reaction to the barium based (?) x-ray contrast,... [He/she is confusing a CAT scan with a colonoscopy!]... and threw up, was already claustrophobic, and had a helluva hangover from the contrast, which effected her ability to concentrate — so she couldn't "perform" her aura readings. [This makes it sound like a short-term problem, rather than decades or a life-time]

---

The interesting point is that the judge tossed out the award because it seemed clear that the jurors had ignored the jury instructions about "loss of business income" [No, the instructions were to ignore the claim that she had psychic powers.] and went ahead and awarded Mrs. Haimes about a million dollars in damages for the loss of her psychic powers.

[Why the jury awarded the $600,000 in damages was not spelled out. The Hospital certainly contributed to her problems by sending her home, and by continuing with the scan after the first reaction, and by delaying compensation for a decade.]

---

"Its apogee seemed to be one of many examples cited in Peter Huber's book Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom: a "soothsayer" who, with the help of "expert" testimony from a doctor and several police officials was awarded $1 million by a jury for the loss of her "psychic powers" following a medical scan."

[Peter Huber at the Manhattan Institute was working at that time on money granted by the tobacco industry both to promote tort-reform and the idea that much of the EPA and OSHA regulation was based on 'junk-science'.]

---

Reform advocates ridiculed a suit brought by a Philadelphia psychic, Judith Haimes, who blamed a badly administered CAT scan for loss of her psychic powers; $986,000 [Actually zero]

1991 Jan 14: A divided bench of the Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld the trial judge's ruling. [Ordering a new trial] Although the case was dead, it continued to walk abroad. Several debunking accounts in the legal press were ineffective to drive a stake through the heart of such a good story. [Marc Galanter] Note: This was now fifteen years after the injury.

1991 Aug: [Source: Marc Galanter]

A month later, Huber's account of junk science tarnishing the legal process underwent a deft piece of editing by the President's Council on Competitiveness, who quoted his account of the case as follows:

"With the backing of 'expert' testimony from a doctor and police department officials, a soothsayer who decided she had lost her psychic powers following a CAT scan persuaded a Philadelphia jury to award her $ 1 million."

Cutting off Huber's account short of the reversal by the trial judge, the Council continues:

"Stories such as this are becoming almost commonplace. 'Expert' witnesses regularly offer....etc."

[Galanter notes that] The Council transforms a cautionary tale of something bizarre that almost happened into a report of something typical and prevalent. Liberated from its anti-climactic ending, the tale of the psychic and the CAT scan is free to occupy its rightful place in the canon of tort horror stories.

    The continuing flow of such stories is promoted by sources such as the internet site ATRA [American Tort Reform Association] Horror Stories: Stories That Show A Legal System That's Out of Control.

See page 5

1991 Sep 30: Neal M Cohen of APCO [Philip Morris owned and controlled — and also the head of ATRA] made a speech which advised tort-reform exectutives to make Judith Haimes into as notorious a public figure as Willie Horton was in the 1988 presidential campaign .

    Reported in an article Busting Liability Reform Dike, Journal of Communications., Marc Galanter quotes him thus:

Neal M. Cohen, senior vice-president at APCO Associates, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm, advises that the first step to "overcome the political strength of the trial lawyers in order to accomplish real reforms [is to] make Judith Haimes into as notorious a public figure as Willie Horton was in the 1988 presidential campaign....

    Her case is just one example of the thousands of absurd cases that trial lawyers clog the courts with..."

1992: [Reporte in 1996] About five years after the case had been dissolved, Peter Huber enlisted the story in his campaign against "junk science" in the courtroom' "His version of events is the one you hear today." [said in 2000].

"The most fantastic verdict recorded so far was worthy of a tabloid: With the backing of "expert" testimony from a doctor and police department officials, a soothsayer who decided she had lost her psychic powers following a CAT scan persuaded a Philadelphia jury to award her $1 million."

"With the backing of 'expert' testimony from a doctor and police department officials, a soothsayer who decided she had lost her psychic powers following a CAT scan persuaded a Phil jury to award her $1 m. Stories such as this are becoming almost commonplace. {so-called] 'Expert witnesses' regularly offer such opinions ..."

1992 Jan 29: The UK newspaper, the Daily Mail carried an article on the American Hertz company imposing a $56/day surcharge on rented automobiles because of the legal fees and damages payouts.

    The paper reported that the pickings for American lawyers are so rich that the country has 730,000 lawyers, whereas Britain had only 45,000 [with a quarter of the population]. If it was the same size as the USA, it would therefore have had 180,000 — or about a quarter of the number in the USA

    The conclusion was that lawyers engaged in frivolous lawsuits, and some amusing cases were mentioned:

a woman who lost her psychic powers during a brain scan received $1,500,000, a burglar who fell though a skylight whilst robbing a house sued the home owner and won damages.

1993 Jul 7: A Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service story by Ginny Wiegand wrote about Haimes claims of psychic powers.

How could she have possibly known about the breast cancer or the sailors on a doomed ship?

    No one told her that Lloyd's sister had had a mastectomy in 1980 and had died eight years later when the cancer resurfaced. And no one told her that Sylvia's father was assigned to the USS Quincy — though not on board — when it was sunk by the Japanese on Aug. 18, 1942, in the battle for Guadalcanal.

    Yet she knew. Or seemed to.

    Maybe Judith Richardson Haimes is as psychic as she claims. Lloyd and Sylvia were certainly unnerved by her revelations at a recent seance at Baleroy, the ...
    (said to be on good terms with John Milton)

1996: Marc Galanter downloaded ten stories from the ATRA "Horror Stories" site and wrote about them in The Arizona Law Review:
    4 were only stories of outrageous claims, where there was no legal outcome
    1 had been thrown out of court
    1 had a verdict for the defendant
    2 had been settled out of court
    2 had been adjudicated: one was class action that had been setteled, and the other was an award to an individual plaintiff.

Galanter also comments in the footnote section of his article:

Of the many critics who have been scandalized by the outrageous award that did not occur in the Haimes case, none have seen fit to comment on the genuine outrage revealed by the procedural history of the case.

    Although the available data does not allow us to apportion responsibility among lawyers, judges, administrators, legislators, or others, there is surely cause for dismay in a system

• in which it took Judge Katz four and a half months to rule on a simple motion,
• in which Judge Goodheart terminated the plaintiff's case by reversing his earlier ruling on the morning of the second trial, and
• in which the case was disposed of by the Superior Court some ten years after filing (and fifteen years after the injury)

2005: Judith Haimes now practices as a grief counsellor and newspaper agony columnist. The social note of Tampa Bay Magazine had a reference in 2008 to Dr Allen and Judith Haimes being seen at the Brookly Academy of Music in New York so she appears to be now able to enjoy life again to some degree.

2009: The Law and Lawyers as Enemy Combatants by Ariel Meyerstein.

One of the primary mediums for transmitting this set of beliefs about the law has come through paradigmatic stories about excessive litigation and excessive damages.

    These horror stories, such as the McDonald's coffee case, or the case of the psychic who brought suit for loss of her business as a spiritual advisor due to complications from a CAT scan — came to plague American society, convincing us of the "litigation explosion" and its rising monetary and social costs.

    They have come to comprise a modern folklore expressing conventional wisdom that everyone accepts as true.

As [Prof Marc] Galanter shows, these stories were worked up into legends by sectors in corporate America, lobbyists, pundits, and writers in corporate-sponsored think tanks, who distorted the numbers and gave partial, decontextualized accounts of the claims and subsequent litigation (if they were even pursued). They bombarded the public with images of "irksome and destructive liability and frequent and excessive punitive awards."

    The McDonald's coffee case, as Galanter notes, is the most famous contemporary example of such horror stories; and who, upon hearing it, does not immediately think of its associated imagery of frivolous lawsuits resulting in excessive rewards?

    In a brief review of some then current legends, Galanter describes an ideal type of such stories:

• they focus on "nutty claims" that are often dismissed by courts (if they are even litigated).
• They "invariably tell of a claim by an individual against an institution, governmental body, or corporation," but never deal with claims brought between individuals or by corporate entities against one another nor with "grotesque or frivolous defenses.
• It is a universe in which corporations and governments are victims, and individuals (and their lawyers) are the aggressors."
• Furthermore, these stories are neither experiential nor analytic accounts, but disembodied cartoon-like tales that pivot on a single bizarre feature....
  1. They are abstracted from media accounts and re-circulated by entrepreneurial publicists through a succession of other media.
  2. In the course of this recirculation, they are further simplified and decontextualized.
  3. They are placed in a timeless narrative present. [As if recent events]
  4. The focus is on the claimant and the triviality of the claim.
  
      The psychic and the CAT scan story, which through its extensive recirculation became, in Galanter's words, "a poster child for tort reform" through its extensive recirculation, offers a helpful illustration of how these legends are born.
  What could have become a narrative of the law working ... of an appropriate correction for a distortion in the system ... was not seen as such, but rather, was seized upon and distorted as evidence of the civil justice system run amok.

Tort-reform
For discussions of the insurance "crises" and the rise of the "tort reform" movement, see Deforming Tort Reform, GEO. L.J. 649 (1990); Sugarman, Taking Advantage of the Torts Crisis, OHIO ST. L.J. 329 (1987); Wiggins & Caldwell, Liability-Limiting Legislation: An Impermissible Intrusion into the Jury's Right to Decide, DRAKE L. REV. 723 (1986-87).]

2009: The mother of five grown children, Haimes now lives in a lakefront home in Clearwater, Fla., with Allen, her dentist husband of more than 25 years, and has a devoted following for her psychic readings.

CONTRIBUTORS:KRS8 sjc2 LR13