After every media-hyped shooting, ambulance-chasing lawyers come out of the woodwork to file lawsuits against the manufacturer of whatever gun this month’s eel-brain happened to lay his hands on to do the deed, despite the Protection in Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
This time they’re doing it for the Uvalde shooting, but they’ve evidently been so sloppy in filing their lawsuit that they’re facing contempt charges.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 students and two teachers, California-based attorney Charles Bonner is facing heat over a federal case to sue the gun store and the manufacturer of the rifle used in the massacre, Daniel Defense.
Bonner told media in August 2022 that he had been hired by Uvalde residents, consisting mostly of families of Robb Elementary students, to file civil lawsuits against numerous entities over the shooting.
Now, he and other attorneys involved are facing both sanctions and criminal contempt charges in federal court over the lax handling of the case.
Both Daniel Defense and gun store Oasis Outback, which sold the rifle to the gunman, have been named as defendants in the federal civil lawsuit seeking $6 billion in damages. Prior to filing the lawsuit, Bonner had announced his intent to file a $27 billion class action lawsuit, but it is unclear if he intends to seek additional damages from other parties in separate lawsuits.
The case was initially filed in the Austin division of the Western District of Texas; however, the case was transferred to the Del Rio division, where the court instructed the plaintiffs to serve the defendants before the case could proceed.
This simple process is where the case began to fall apart procedurally.
Numerous documents beginning in June show federal Judge Alia Moses giving multiple orders to the plaintiff attorneys to properly serve the defendants, writing, “The Defendants must be afforded due process instead of plaintiff counsel’s apparent wish to improperly litigate this case ex parte,” accusing the attorneys of using the case to serve their interests alone.
But the lax handling of the case didn’t stop with the first admonishment by the court.
Moses set a hearing to discuss why the plaintiffs failed to properly serve the defendants, a hearing the attorneys did not attend.
“Serving defendants the lawsuit” is hardly a deep, dark secret of the legal profession. Indeed, it’s why process servers exist as a profession.
This prompted Moses to set another hearing, ordering the plaintiffs’ legal counsel to appear in a hearing where the court will consider sanctions for failing to follow its instructions and potentially issue contempt charges for failing to appear.
“The Court will consider additional sanctions for the failure to appear and will consider referring the plaintiff’s counsel for contempt prosecution based on the failure to appear at the sanctions hearing,” Moses’s order states.
Lawyers, even ambulance chasers, are supposed to be smarter than the average bear. But this is a pretty basic, stupid, unforced error on Bonner’s part…