Take it to Trial

The Sackler family is threatening to pull out the opioid settlement if they don't get immunity.

This should surprise no one.  The Sacklers are as guilty as hell, and they should be prosecuted.

Before they are prosecuted though,  we should start with asset forfeiture.

It would be WAY harder for the Sacklers to fight prosecutions, and civil suits if their wealth were seized, and  their wealth is CLEARLY the results of a criminal enterprise.  (FWIW, I actually oppose asset seizure for people not convicted of a crime)

To quote Billie Ray Valentine, "You know, it occurs to me that the best way to hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people."

Also, using asset forfeiture against them would be a greater deterrent to future wrong-doers than a few years in club fed:

A scion of the Sackler family, the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma, vowed in court on Tuesday that the family would walk away from a $4.5 billion pledge to help communities nationwide that have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, unless a judge grants it immunity from all current and future civil claims associated with the company.

Absent that broad release from liability, said David Sackler, 41, a former board member and grandson of one of the founders, the family would no longer support the deal that the parties have painstakingly negotiated over two years to settle thousands of opioids lawsuits brought by states, cities, tribes and other plaintiffs.

………

Instead, he said he believed the Sacklers would resume fighting all the cases “to their final outcomes” — a process that would be inordinately costly and protracted for everyone involved.

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A federal bankruptcy judge had been expected to confirm the plan at the end of these hearings, particularly after a majority of states that had earlier opposed the deal expressed support for it last month. But objections to the legal shield for the Sacklers have become the sharp focus of much of the testimony. The details of the Sacklers’ liability releases are so far-reaching that last week Judge Robert Drain himself said he had “some concerns about the breadth.”

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He said the family anticipated that the liability shield would cover him, other members of his extensive family, and about 1,000 other individuals, including contractors and consultants, and protect them from lawsuits that had nothing to do with opioids.

That means they would be forever immunized from any current and future lawsuits worldwide related not only directly to Purdue’s opioids but to other drugs the company makes, including drugs for addiction reversal, high cholesterol and even constipation as a result of taking prescription opioids.

Purdue and the actions of Sackler family members, who as hands-on board members took a keen interest in drastically downplaying the addictive qualities of OxyContin in marketing efforts, have been widely implicated in the opioid epidemic.

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At least 2,700 lawsuits and hundreds of thousands of claims have been registered against Purdue, beginning in 2014, when the opioid epidemic began to crest. The plaintiffs span a vast array including 48 states, local governments, tribes, hospitals, individuals and monitors of infants born with symptoms of withdrawal to opioids, all of whom have been ravaged and financially depleted by opioids.

In more recent years, individual Sacklers themselves have been named in a growing number of the cases.

Nearly two years ago, Purdue filed for bankruptcy restructuring, which put an automatic stay on those lawsuits. But the Sacklers themselves did not file for bankruptcy, although they insisted that they, too, benefit from the liability releases expected to be given to their company.

The issue of releases for the Sacklers and other third parties is at the heart of the resistance to the bankruptcy plan now pursued by nine states, including Maryland, Washington and Connecticut. The District of Columbia, the federal Justice Department and U.S. Trustee, a program in the Justice Department that monitors bankruptcy cases, as well as some Canadian local governments and First Nations, have joined in the objections.

According to current law in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in which Judge Drain’s court is located, the judge can grant releases to the Sacklers and other third-party individuals who have not filed for bankruptcy. But, broadly speaking, the issue is unsettled.

The Sacklers need to pay for what they did, and the forum shopping games that they played to get in front of  Judge Drain, who is notoriously friendly to corporate wrongdoers in bankruptcy cases.

There needs to be real accountability, and the ability of people like the Sacklers to use the bankruptcy code, and forum shopping, to evade the consequences of their actions is a disgrace.