Revenge of the Orphans

"WHY WASN'T I A TERRIBLE MAN WHEN WE BROUGHT them the wheelchairs that are getting them around?" asked Jerry Lewis on ABC's Prime Time Live -- a remarkably bitter const the cigarette industry. And for five years those companies have been trying to remove Sarokin from those cases. Last week they succeeded. In what it termed a "most agonizing" decision, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that Sarokin appeared biased against the cigarette industry. The court cited a February opinion in which Sarokin said that "despite some rising pretenders, the tobacco industry may be the king of concealment and disinformation."

Tobacco-industry defendants expressed relief that Sarokin was no longer on the case. Said Charles Wall, a lawyer for Philip Morris: "We did not claim that he is not a good judge, but we believed he had prejudged some important issues in the litigation." Sarokin disagreed. Removing himself from another tobacco case last week, the judge delivered a strong rebuke to the court of appeals. "I fear for the independence of the judiciary if a powerful litigant can cause the removal of a judge for speaking the truth based upon the evidence," he wrote. "If the standard established here had been applied to the late Judge John Sirica, Richard Nixon might have continued as President of the United States." More than 50 U.S. cases against the cigarette industry are pending.