Harduff Stone’s Greatest Legal Victories!
1. Harduff Stone Protects Americans’ Right to Work!
A company called Grump Rent-Yer-Self ran ads offering to rent late-model cars for five dollars for one month. Buried in the fine print of the rental contract (also prepared by Harduff Stone) was a clause requiring the customer to become the company’s unpaid “indentured servant” for fifty years, as partial consideration for the low rental rate. When the customers returned the cars, they were shot with tranquilizer darts and shipped off to a sugar plantation on a company-owned island. The family of one of the “indentured servants” sued in federal court for her release, claiming that enforcement of the rental contracts would violate the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on “involuntary servitude.” However, Harduff Stone successfully argued that the contracts were signed “voluntarily” by the company’s customers, and Justice Scalia, writing for a badly divided Supreme Court, held that the Constitution protected the right of the citizens of the United States to sign stupid contracts.
2. Harduff Stone Helps Out Debt-Ridden Orphans!
A billionaire was walking down the street one day when he slipped and fell on an icy sidewalk in front of an orphanage, damaging his trousers and slightly twisting his ankle. Harduff Stone filed suit on the wealthy fellow’s behalf, and recovered a verdict against the orphanage and its residents far in excess of their insurance policy’s coverage limits. Then he seized the building and threw out all the orphans. However, after the billionaire turned the orphanage into an asbestos-fiber garment factory, Stone kindly arranged for many of the orphans to work there for at least sixteen hours a day until their portion of the judgment was paid off.
3. Harduff Stone Gets Tough on Crime!
When he was with the local prosecutor’s office, Harduff Stone, acting on a bet with some of his colleagues, prosecuted a man for murder even though no body had ever been found, and even though there was no evidence whatsoever linking the defendant to the alleged crime. Stone rounded up a slew of unsavory “witnesses” by offering them lenient treatment for the serious crimes they had committed, and obtained a murder conviction even though the alleged victim appeared at trial and testified that she was not dead and had never met the defendant. At a wild party with his fellow prosecutors after the defendant was executed, Stone observed, “It doesn’t take a legal genius to put away a real murderer. The true test of a great prosecutor is to get a conviction when there isn’t any evidence that the defendant is guilty.”
4. Harduff Stone Provides Free Legal Representation to the Most Downtrodden Members of Our Society!
In the summer of 1995, a serial killer named Napoleon “Clammy” Chooder began to terrorize a large metropolitan area in the Midwest. He kidnapped, slayed, and devoured at least nineteen children before he was accidentally discovered by an off-duty police officer while Chooder was conducting a gruesome “Charity Boy-B-Q” in a city park. Recognizing the huge potential for media exposure, Harduff Stone took on the case for free.
Using a jury consultant and a team of investigators, Stone picked one of the dumbest juries ever assembled and successfully argued that “a person would have to be crazy to do what this poor deranged man is accused of. Did you hear what he said when I asked him his name? He thinks he’s Napoleon, for crying out loud. He belongs in a mental institution, not a prison.”
Shortly after the jury found Mr. Chooder not guilty by reason of insanity, Stone persuaded a particularly credulous psychiatrist that Chooder had been “cured” through the doctor’s masterful psychoanalytic techniques, and he was released to a halfway house. Of course, he disappeared at the first opportunity and went on yet another killing spree. Among his victims were Harduff Stone’s own parents. (It turns out that Mr. Chooder didn’t appreciate being repeatedly described in the press as a “basket case” and a “poster child for mental illness.”)
On the bright side, however, Harduff Stone had redrafted his parents’ will shortly before they were added to Mr. Chooder’s diet, and he received a large legacy as the sole heir of their estate. The new will came as quite a shock to Stone’s brothers and sisters, many of whom were of very modest means, and all of whom were much closer to their parents than Stone, whose secretary invariably told them when they called that their son was “in a meeting.”
After Chooder was accidentally caught by the police when one of his neighbors complained about the large accumulation of bones in his backyard, Stone agreed to represent him again, saying, “My parents were very old anyway when they were killed, and I know they wouldn’t have wanted me to give up a potentially lucrative movie and book deal just because this is the person who killed them . . . I mean ‘allegedly’ killed them.”
The second trial did not go as well for Mr. Chooder. Although Stone used the same jury consultant and investigative team again, this time he picked a jury full of bloodthirsty crime victims who deliberated for five minutes before finding Chooder guilty and recommending the death penalty. Unfortunately, the prison authorities were unable to grant Chooder’s last meal request, telling him that “Mr. Stone is not on the menu.”
5. Harduff Stone Protects Our Valiant Doctors From Greedy Medical Malpractice Lawyers!
Therrel Lee Scrude was in an upbeat mood as he checked into Hades Hospital for a routine hernia operation. Obviously, this married father of two young children had no idea that he would be leaving a week later in a body bag with a number of his important parts missing.
Doctor G. Wuttuck Whack was weaving down the ward that morning, glassy-eyed from a combination of powerful prescription opiates and gin, and no one was safe. Mistaking Scrude for a patient with a similar-sounding name who had testicular cancer, Doc Whack ordered the patient injected with a drug that he was extremely allergic to, and then misread the resulting paralysis as general anesthesia. Since no anesthesia was ever administered, the patient was entirely conscious but unable to scream when Whack removed his testicles and sewed him up, leaving a sharp surgical instrument inside the patient. Oh, and did I mention that Whack didn’t bother washing his hands that morning, even though he had spent the night sleeping on the floor of a toilet stall at the bus station?
Over the next six days, Scrude developed gangrene, which Doc Whack didn’t treat, saying that it was “nothing to worry about.” He also harvested several vital organs from Scrude and sold them on the Internet. Finally, when Scrude’s paralysis eased momentarily long enough for him to beg Whack for some pain medication (Whack had actually prescribed some morphine, but then took it himself), Whack personally administered a massive overdose of fentanyl. Scrude then went into convulsions and died in agonizing pain in front of his wife and children after his heart exploded.
Doc Whack, of course, doctored the medical records to make it appear that Scrude had suffered from an untreated heart condition and had been shooting up heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and an assortment of other illegal drugs, all of which came as a big surprise to his friends and family, after Hades Hospital leaked the story to the press. The grieving widow and her children got an even bigger surprise when the local police seized all of Scrude’s assets on the theory that they had been obtained as a result of his involvement in the illegal drug trade.
Actually, Scrude had been in the drug trade, but not the illegal one. His small biochemical firm had been on the verge of developing an inexpensive vaccine to prevent cancer. Unfortunately, as a result of his death and the seizure of all of his assets, the company quickly went out of business.
Scrude’s widow Lucy and her children hired a lawyer and sued Doc Whack and Hades Hospital, and their insurance company hired Harduff Stone.
Stone’s first task was to destroy the public image of Scrude and his family. He called Scrude a “drug fiend” who ran a company that exploited the misery of cancer victims to earn a fat profit. His detectives photographed the widow having lunch with her brother, who Stone described in court as her “secret lover.” He also told the judge that the widow would “sleep with anybody” who might give her testimony to help her case, and that “we have a name for that kind of person, Your Honor, and it starts with a big fat ‘W’.” He also kept “accidentally” referring to Lucy as “Floozy.”
Stone also provided local television stations with grainy videos supposedly showing Scrude’s children laughing at his funeral and dancing on his grave. He also found a so-called “friend of the family” who told reporters that Scrude had repeatedly molested not only his own children but also their pets.
Despite Stone’s spectacularly effective campaign of character assassination, things were not going completely well for the defense. It turns out that Doc Whack was not really a doctor at all, but an escaped mental patient. He had obtained a state medical license and gotten hired by Hades Hospital by presenting a diploma that he had found in a children’s toy doctor kit and filled out in crayon, identifying him as a graduate of the Fauxnee Medical School in Putzylvania, Uztinkistan. The text of the diploma was a bunch of foreign-sounding gibberish, and no one bothered to check with a translator, not that there is much of a demand for translators from Uztinkistan, which doesn’t exist.
On the day of trial before the Honorable J. Piggley Flumbo, Harduff Stone presented an affidavit from Doc Whack in which he swore that his real name was “Marcus Illby.” Stone insisted that “since the plaintiffs here have named the wrong party, this whole case has to be dismissed.” Unfortunately for Mrs. Scrude and her family, it was a pleasant spring day, and Judge Flumbo had been invited to play golf on his favorite course that afternoon. So he threw out the case.
The plaintiffs appealed, of course, but the intermediate appellate court in Scrude’s state was so swamped that they swept most of the errors they confronted under the rug, usually in unpublished opinions featuring dubious reasoning and cheap excuses for refusing to do anything. In the case of Scrude v Hades Hospital, they issued a short and stupid opinion finding that Judge Flumbo’s decision was not “clearly erroneous.” Then the state supreme court, which was dominated at the time by judges who believed that lawsuits were bad for business, refused to consider the case.
Not satisfied with this victory, Harduff Stone then asked Judge Flumbo to hold the plaintiffs liable for the two and a half million dollars in attorney fees he had charged the insurance company to defend the case, saying that the plaintiffs should be “punished for filing a frivolous lawsuit.” Judge Flumbo granted that motion, and then ordered Mrs. Scrude and her children to work twelve hours a day at minimum wage cleaning Stone’s mansion and stables (which contained their sleeping quarters) until the debt was paid off. (This would never happen, because the interest on the attorney fee award was more than their earnings.)
After the case was over, Stone successfully sued the state medical licensing board to force them to reinstate Doc Whack’s license to practice medicine. He is still working at Hades Hospital.
6. Harduff Stone Protects Loving Father’s Parental Rights!
Pete O’Feiyel was a wealthy business executive with a trophy wife, Ditsie, and four beautiful teenage daughters. One day Ditsie came to Pete’s building to meet with him, and his secretary had her wait in his office while she tracked him down. Ditsie noticed that there was a television/DVD player in the office, and she turned it on, figuring that she might as well watch a movie or whatever he had in there. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a video of her husband drugging one of their daughters after she had fallen asleep, and then molesting her.
Suddenly Ditsie heard her husband’s voice, and quickly turned off the television. She pretended that nothing was wrong, and when she left the office, she went straight to the police. The police then went right to Pete’s office, arrested him, and then searched his office, finding several similar videos showing him molesting each of his daughters.
Since Pete was a prominent business leader, he was spared the usual ass-kicking on the way to the station, and they even let him call his lawyer, Harduff Stone, while they were in transit. By the time Pete was brought in for booking, Stone was there with a court order requiring his immediate release without bail.
Even before formal criminal charges could be filed, Stone had filed a lawsuit against the police charging them with violating Pete’s Fourth Amendment right to be protected from warrantless searches and seizures. It turns out that the police had stupidly neglected to get a warrant before the search and arrest. The court quickly ruled the arrest and search illegal, suppressed all of the evidence, and ordered it to be returned to Pete, who immediately destroyed it. With no evidence, all of the criminal charges were dismissed. Stone eventually dropped the lawsuit in exchange for some “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. (Technically, they were agreements by the District Attorney’s office to forego prosecution for certain criminal acts committed in the future by Stone or his clients. And no, you can’t get one of those yourself. They are only for the richest and most influential members of our society. In other words, the people who can afford to hire Harduff Stone.)
In the meantime, Ditsie had filed for divorce and full custody of her daughters. But with no admissible evidence of abuse, she was probably going to have to live with joint custody, plus a nice alimony award. All of that changed after the court-ordered psychological evaluations of Pete and Ditsie and their daughters, plus the court-ordered urine tests. It seems that the headshrinker was on the payroll of one of Stone’s many pals, which is why the court was told that Ditsie was emotionally unstable and was harming her daughters by improperly shielding them from their father. That was bad enough, but when Ditsie’s drug test came back positive for marijuana use (yes, one of Harduff’s pals owned the drug testing lab), Ditsie was in trouble, since this judge (J. Piggley Flumbo) had relished sending people to rot in jail for illegal drug possession when he worked in the district attorney’s office, where he was known as the “Dope Fiend” (although he didn’t realize that this was intended as a double entendre).
The final nail in Ditsie’s coffin was when Stone found some skuzzy-looking wild-eyed homeless guy to claim that he was having an affair with her. When Ditsie’s lawyer pointed out that the witness was obviously insane, Judge Flumbo said, “Well, if that’s so, then your client is endangering her children by consorting with a person like that.” (I guess it is important to mention here that our state judiciary is drawn largely from the politically well-connected, as opposed to the cream of the legal crop. If we ran our university system the same way, there would be a lot more opportunities in the higher education field for the highly uneducated.)
Judge Flumbo’s ruling was a foregone conclusion. He granted full custody to Pete, “because Ditsie has shown herself to an unfit parent due to her drug use,” and ordered her to pay her rich husband two grand a month in child support. Ditsie managed to find a job, but then got fired when Stone sent the phony drug lab report to her idiotic employer, who valued clean urine samples over competence. Then she got dragged in front of Judge Flumbo again, who called her a “lazy pothead” and send her to jail for nonsupport. While she was in jail, Stone got Ditsie’s parental rights terminated. By Judge Flumbo.
Afterward, Pete found that taking care of four teenage girls was interfering with his social life (which typically seemed to involve other teenage girls), so he took them on a “family vacation” to Saudi Arabia, and sold them to a wealthy sheik for his harem. Ditsie got knifed to death in prison while her appeal languished before some hopelessly overburdened appellate court. Meanwhile, Pete got himself a brand new trophy wife with four beautiful daughters, and they all lived happily ever after.
7. Harduff Stone Shields Children From Dangerous Products!
(Editor’s Note: As most intelligent people [as opposed to the target audience of this website] are aware, lawyers’ accounts of their exploits fall largely within the realm of fiction. So we know you won’t mind us telling you about a case that Harduff Stone hasn’t filed yet. But he will. So grit your teeth and get ready for a future shaped by Harduff Stone and his pals.)
Our story begins when Harduff Stone stepped on a wad of chewing gum on the way from the courthouse to his limousine. He vowed revenge. After having the gum chemically analyzed and extorting a large settlement from the guilty gum company (which had negligently marketed gum with a sticky quality), he got a good whiff of cash and decided to go after the whole candy industry.
Luckily, right around then, Stone found out that Dan DeLyon, the ten-year-old son of one of his robber baron billionaire clients, had been victimized by the candy industry. His father had built him his own life-sized McMansion made entirely out of candy to live in, and by the time the unfortunate young man got done eating himself out of house and home, he weighed 300 pounds, and all of his teeth had rotted away. Harduff Stone pounced.
Stone filed a class action on DeLyon’s behalf against every candy manufacturer and supplier in the world, claiming that they had failed to warn their customers that eating candy could make them gain weight and harm their teeth, and that candy was a dangerous and defective product that had harmed billions of people. Stone charged that the defendants had deliberately put sugar and other sweeteners in their products to make them more attractive to consumers, and had focused their marketing efforts primarily on “innocent children.”
Stone’s lawsuit sought to recover damages on behalf of every person in the country who had ever eaten a piece of candy. He also brought the suit on behalf of all fifty states, claiming damages from increased health care costs. Finally, every single company in the nation (except the candy company defendants) was also made part of the class, on the theory that they had suffered from increased health care costs and decreased productivity.
Most of the smaller candy companies went out of business almost immediately, as Stone’s legal team hounded them into bankruptcy and beyond, holding public burnings of their seized candy-making supplies and equipment, and demonizing them in the press to the point that lynch mobs often tracked down their executives.
The bigger companies fought back, dramatically raising the price of candy to cover their legal costs, but then caved in to the legal onslaught and agreed to liquidate themselves and surrender all of their assets to the court handling the class action. Stone then used his new reputation as a consumer crusader to pump up his law practice. A particularly vivid commercial for Stone’s law firm showed him yanking a lollipop out of a baby’s mouth, followed by the arrest of the baby’s parents for child neglect.
No public company would sell candy any more, so candy-making went underground, but then the government started keeping track of sugar purchases and busting unlicensed “candy labs,” to “protect our children.” The “street price” of candy skyrocketed, while children found with candy were expelled from school and sent to “candy rehab.” Violent “candy wars” broke out between gangs fighting for control of the street trade.
Soon the President of the United States declared a “national candy emergency” and increased border security to stop shipments from other countries, declaring that “candy abuse” was the biggest problem facing the country. The nitwits in Congress and the craven state legislatures, afraid of being accused of being “soft on candy,” began passing laws providing for stiff mandatory sentences for “candy pushers” and “candy junkies” alike. Soon the jails were filled to overflowing with candy criminals, and violent crime rose sharply as prosecutorial and police resources were diverted away from traditional law enforcement.
The assets surrendered by the candy companies yielded billions of dollars to be distributed by the court. Dan DeLyon got a hundred million, which he blew on “street candy” and stupid investments. The court had to make a show of giving something to the people and companies who supposedly won the class action, so it approved the following compensation plan. Every person in the country got a coupon for a dollar off a tube of toothpaste, and every company in the country got a free “candy testing” kit, so they could test all of their employees and fire anyone found to be abusing candy. The state governments each received a few million which they were supposed to use for “candy education,” but which actually went to make up for budget shortfalls caused by increased costs for candy prosecutions. All the rest of the money went to Harduff Stone as his reward for putting the evil candy manufacturers out of business and protecting the public from the scourge of candy.
