"The one hope for New York businesses may be the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the deference afforded to the states and their courts, the court has occasionally intervened to block excessive damage awards.
For example, in 1996, the justices limited state-awards of punitive damages under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In that case, BMW was found to have repainted luxury cars damaged in transit without telling buyers.
An Alabama jury awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the loss of value in having a factory paint job, but then added $4 million in punitive damages. Even when the Alabama Supreme Court reduced that to $2 million, the U.S. Supreme Court still found it excessive. Even liberals on the Court such as John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer agreed that such “grossly excessive” awards raise a “basic unfairness of depriving citizens of life, liberty, or property, through the application of arbitrary coercion.”
The court may find almost half a billion dollars in damages without a single lost dollar from a victim to be a tad excessive.
That prospect will not dampen the thrill-kill environment in New York this week. In electing openly partisan prosecutors such as James and District Attorney Alvin Bragg, voters have shown a preference for political prosecutions and investigations.
In “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe wrote about Sherman McCoy, a successful businessman who had achieved the status of one of the “masters of the universe” in New York. In the prosecution of McCoy for a hit-and-run, Wolfe described a city and legal system devouring itself in the politics of class and race. The book details a businessman’s fall from a great height — a fall that delighted New Yorkers.
It is doubtful Trump will end up as the same solitary figure wearing worn-out clothes before the Bronx County Criminal Court clutching a binder of legal papers. But you do not have to feel sorry or even sympathetic for Trump to see this award as obscene. The appeal will test the New York legal system to see if other judges can do what Judge Engoron found so difficult: set aside their feelings about Trump.
New York is one of our oldest and most distinguished bars. It has long resisted those who sought to use the law to pursue political opponents and unpopular figures. It will now be tested to see if those values transcend even Trump."
