Man's Worth

In Oklahoma's Creek County Superior Court last week, a jury of seven women and five men awarded $650,000* in damages, to be paid by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, to onetime Glass Plant Worker John R. Edwards, 55. In March 1956 a Katy train plowed into the Edwards family Chevrolet at a crossing in Tulsa. There were no warning signals. The engineer blew no whistle, was traveling 35 m.p.h. in a 25 m.p.h. zone. Edwards suffered a broken ankle, ribs and jaw plus a severe brain injury that brought on mental degeneration with slipbacks at times to the mentality of a small child. His wife had her neck, right hip, both legs, both knees broken. His daughter, an American Airlines hostess, suffered a crushed breast bone, broken ankle, developed a blood clot. In March Mrs. Edwards got a $175,000 damages award.

The $650,000 Edwards verdict was the highest ever made in the U.S. in a personal-injury suit arising from an accident, and the most spectacular sign yet of the new U.S. trend toward higher and higher person-liability awards. The trend worries jurists and horrifies insurance companies, but impresses a heady new breed of trial lawyers as what one of them calls "a healthy condition--we're beginning to realize the worth of a human life." Caught in the legal arena in which juries are inclined to be hard on big corporations, the Katy railroad filed notice of appeal to the Oklahoma Supreme Court against Mrs. Edwards' $175,000 award, and this week will file motion for a new trial, hoping to set aside or cut down John Edwards' $650,000.

* Which, like most court judgments in personal-injury cases, is tax-free.

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