United States District Court, S.D. Mississippi, Hattiesburg Division. 2004.
This case arose out of ingestion of stadol by the plaintiffs. This medication was suspected to be addictive and contained harmful substances that had side effects. In this case multiple plaintiffs were involved and joined together to sue the defendants. The plaintiffs filed this suit against the defendants who they accused of being negligent, breached their warranties, committed fraud and breached their fiduciary duties. The defendants were also accused of not putting strict warnings to the users of their products, deceiving the public, concealing information and willingly misrepresenting their products.
The Plaintiffs claimed negligence by the physician and the clinic in which he was working for, Jefferson Medical Associates. Linda Jones was the only plaintiff that the physician had treated and none of the other four plaintiffs had been treated by the physician or at the clinic. The defendants claimed that the plaintiffs had fraudulently joined together to accuse them and this was not allowed as they resided in different parts of the country and thus had bought the product from different pharmacies. There exists a supreme court that is above the federal courts. These federal courts have limited jurisdiction and cannot act outside their statutory subject matter because they will violate their basic constitutional perception of having limited federal powers. Therefore, these courts should not take over cases that have been properly presented in the state courts. The defendants claimed a fraudulent joinder. This presented a burden of demonstrating the facts to the courts and presenting the proper evidence. In this case the removing party was the defendants who faced a heavy burden of proving the fraudulent joinder clearly and convincingly to the courts.
It was within the courts discretion to determine the severance of the claim in this case and to determine whether the parties involved have been improperly or fraudulently joined and whether they were attempting to defeat the diversity jurisdiction. The plaintiff can plead through a complaint that is properly written incase he wants to avoid the federal jurisdiction. The statutes give the original jurisdiction to the federal district courts incase of complete diversity among the residents and incase the amount involved exceeds the jurisdictional amount. In this case, the plaintiffs were claiming a same series of transactions or occurrences since they had all been affected by the same medicine that was being manufactured and marketed by the same pharmaceutical company. This brought about the common questions of fact and law that applied to their claims against the defendants of the pharmaceutical company. Was the physician liable to all the plaintiffs or was he liable only to the plaintiff he treated (Beck & Vale, 2004).
Jones claims against the physician and the pharmacy were both legally and factually related as there was a representation of common occurrences and common issues resulting from the injury he sustained after the ingestion of the stadol medication. It has been pointed out that the health care provider is similar to a consumer of a product when the use of the product is accompanied by the provision of the medical services. Therefore strict liability theory should not be extended to the health care providers as it would set the standards of their performance to be high, a level that would be difficult for them to achieve at all times. Hence a doctor should only be subjected to strict liability or warranty to the extent that he manufactures or modifies the drugs.The degree of alteration should be considered here and diluting or just mixing a drug before use has not been taken as enough to claim liabilities to the health care providers.
It was concluded that there was an egregious misjoinder of the physician and the other four plaintiffs. Their claim did not arise out of a common transaction and they lacked common issues and thus should not be joined together with the physician. The court ruled out that the physician was misjoined with the pharmaceutical company and also to the other four plaintiffs not treated by him. Therefore, it was ordered that the plaintiffs claim to remand be granted in part and also be denied in part as there was no connection between the persons from the different states apart from ingesting the medication. Therefore their case ought to be separated from Jones who had dealt with the physician (Cross & Miller, 2008).
Reference List
Beck, J., & Vale, A. (2004). Drug and medical device product liability desk book. Chicago. Law Journal Press.
Cross, F., & Miller, R. (2008). The Legal Environment of Business: Text and Cases — Ethical, Regulatory, Global, and E-Commerce Issues.New York. Cengage Learning.