The People's Advocate by Daniel Sheehan

Author:Daniel Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619022539
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER twenty

I FLEW BACK FROM Oklahoma, where Bill Taylor and I had been investigating Harold Behrens, to Washington, D.C., to work with Kitty, Bob, and Sara to develop exactly what federal civil complaint we had to file in order to give us the breadth of discovery we would need to get to the bottom of these three mysteries: What had happened to Karen Silkwood? What had happened to her documents? And what had happened to the forty pounds of bomb-grade plutonium that had gone missing from the Kerr-McGee nuclear reprocessing plant? Our challenge was to not violate rule 11 of the federal rules of civil procedure, which required any licensed attorney who signed a given federal civil complaint to swear that he or she was in possession of adequately credible information (even if not yet in a technically court-admissible form) on the basis of which he or she had come to hold an actual “good faith belief” that each and every allegation set forth in the complaint was true and accurate—and had a reasonable chance of being proven to a reasonable jury to be “more likely than not” true.

Kitty Tucker, being only a first-year law student and not yet a licensed attorney, wanted me to “throw the kitchen sink” at everyone we could think of as a potential defendant. In support of her position, Kitty cited the typical plaintiff’s tort complaint, in which the plaintiff’s civil attorney sues everybody in sight, uses the civil discovery process to sort through all the named defendants, and then tosses out, one by one, the named defendants as they are each exonerated through the civil discovery process. For example, as Kitty argued, if a commercial airplane crashed into a private home, the plaintiff’s attorney would usually sue the airline; the manufacturer of the airplane; the pilot and the crew of the plane; the company responsible for training the pilot and crew; the company in charge of maintaining the plane; the corporation that had manufactured the wheels for the airplane; and so on. This was typical “plaintiff’s practice” as she understood it from law school.

I explained to Kitty that I was not a “typical private plaintiff’s attorney.” I was instead a people’s advocate: a public interest civil prosecutor who would investigate and litigate cases that sought to effectuate the best interest of “the people” when the government’s attorneys failed to do so or, more commonly, refused to do so for one political reason or another. I therefore insisted upon conducting myself just as though I were bound by the same constitutional constraints as were government prosecutors. I explained to Kitty that it was not my job to make all conceivable claims and then pick my way through them looking for the ones that were true. I had to personally believe that a specific accusation was true, or else I would not make it.

For that reason, I insisted that Bill Taylor and I be the sole arbiters as to what allegations would or would not be

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