In Amazon Prime Video’s biographical film ‘The Burial,’ Mississippi-based funeral home owner Jeremiah O’Keefe sues the Loewen Group, a multi-billion-dollar demise care provider that moves a deal with the former to shop for his 3 funeral homes. As the film depicts, Raymond “Ray” Loewen then decided in opposition to buying the homes, only for O’Keefe to imagine that the businessman used to be waiting for him to move bankrupt. The Mississippi guy then fought a extremely intriguing criminal fight towards Ray and won the similar. Naturally, the viewers will have to be all in favour of the specifics of O’Keefe’s win towards the Loewen Group. Well, right here’s what we will proportion about the similar!
The Half-a-Billion Dollar Win
At the end of the case, the jury directed the Loewen Group to pay Jeremiah O’Keefe $500 million in damages. After the verdict, O’Keefe settled for $one hundred seventy five million. At the get started of the negotiations, O’Keefe’s attorney Michael Cavanaugh requested for $6.5 million, just for the Loewen Group legal professionals to dismiss the same. “I did the whole thing however get down on my knees and beg for 4 million. They mentioned, ‘That’s outrageous! Our client would fireplace us if we brought that again to him,’” Cavanaugh instructed Jonathan Harr for his The New Yorker article “The Burial,” the source text of the movie.
The demand drastically modified when the famed Willie E. Gary became O’Keefe’s lead prosecutor. Willie demanded $one hundred twenty five million for a agreement even after O’Keefe’s buddy and lawyer Mike Allred calculated the damages to about $Sixteen million. When Loewen didn’t even officially respond to the call for, the case went to the courtroom. The multi-billion-dollar company CEO believed that he had not anything to worry about. “His [Loewen’s] prison suggest had confident him that he would win the case. And even supposing, for some unexpected reason, he did no longer win, the maximum possible publicity his company faced, his lawyers instructed him, could be a lack of between six and twelve million dollars, the approximate quantity of O’Keefe’s damages,” Harr’s article reads.
At the end of the trial, the jury awarded O’Keefe $260 million. This sum used to be except for the compensatory damages and punitive damages, which took the total quantity to $500 million. “On Monday, November 6th, Judge Graves signed the formal entry of judgment in the amount of 5 hundred million bucks for the plaintiffs,” Harr wrote in his article. “I may just not imagine what I was hearing. I was completely shocked. I assumed, this may’t be happening,” Loewen said about listening to the verdict, as in step with the supply textual content.
Even despite the fact that O’Keefe gained $500 million in overall, he considered the aftermath of Loewen’s possible appeal. “O’Keefe had no doubt that Loewen wish to appeal if he was once able. Neither O’Keefe nor Gary relished the idea of an attraction, which might take years to grind its method thru the judicial machine, and may additionally, of course, end in a reversal. The day after the access of judgment, O’Keefe requested Gary to contact Loewen’s lawyers with the goal of settling the case,” Harr wrote about O’Keefe’s decision to settle as an alternative of aiming for $500 million. O’Keefe then settled for $a hundred seventy five million.
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