The Supreme Court has rejected a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would've shielded Sackler family members who own the company from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids but also would've provided billions of dollars to combat the epidemic.
I'm torn on this one. Obviously, the victims deserve to get payment and whatnot, but the other half of this is that the bankruptcy court agreement with the Sackler family would prevent them from future liability for similar cases. Supreme Court is saying the bankruptcy court didn't have the power to grant that, which, if excluded, would open the Sacklers to future lawsuits. I'm all for that family getting sued into oblivion, but we can't trust the Supreme Court to do what's right either. We have to treat everything they do with suspicion. This comes on the heels of the ruling of 'bribery is now basically legal', so it makes me wonder how much the Sackler family is paying them.
Far too many wealthy people have forgotten the alternative to these processes of checks and balances. And too often they get away with little to no damages done to them. As QoL continues to plummet, they will eventually push someone with nothing to lose.
It was rejected because the settlement would have made the company bulletproof against any further civil suits and effectively left the most villainous people with billions of dollars
After deliberating more than six months, the justices in a 5-4 vote blocked an agreement hammered out with state and local governments and victims.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
The high court had put the settlement on hold last summer, in response to objections from the Biden administration.
Arguments in early December lasted nearly two hours in a packed courtroom as the justices seemed, by turns, unwilling to disrupt a carefully negotiated settlement and reluctant to reward the Sacklers.
The Purdue Pharma settlement would have ranked among the largest reached by drug companies, wholesalers and pharmacies to resolve epidemic-related lawsuits filed by state, local and Native American tribal governments and others.
Sackler family members no longer are on the company’s board, and they have not received payouts from it since before Purdue Pharma entered bankruptcy.
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I was all ready for outrage, but I think maybe they got this one right. Equality under the law should mean that the top of a pyramid is treated the same as the bottom.