For years now, companies guilty of wrongdoing have used bankruptcy to protect the personal assets of owners and executives from civil claims against them. That must change.
Kathleen Scarpone, left, of Kingston, New Hampshire, and Cheryl Juaire, second from left, of Marlborough, Massachusetts, protest in front of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, at Harvard University, April 12, 2019, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Scarpone, who lost her son to OxyContin addiction, and Juarie addressed three Sackler family members during a virtual U.S. Bankruptcy Court hearing, March 10, 2022.
The Sacklers made billions engineering an opioid epidemic that ruined countless lives and killed off Americans by the hundreds of thousands. You might have seen them portrayed on TV in Hulu’s “Dopesick” series, or the current “Painkiller” series on Netflix. Sackler family members have denied many of the allegations against them, and none has accepted full responsibility for the opioid plague.
To avoid dragging out the proceedings, many creditors go along with the releases, recognizing that under current law, agreeing to give miscreants a free pass is the only practical way to collect money in a reasonable time frame. In the Purdue case, the price of swallowing an unjust ruling was the $6 billion that Sackler family members agreed to part with as long as they could keep the rest of their fortune unencumbered.
These strange bedfellows illustrate how the Supreme Court justices might set aside their ideological differences to either arrive at a narrow set of circumstances when the releases can be imposed or, preferably from our point of view, throw out this amoral practice altogether. For the three more liberal justices, the specter of bankruptcy courts depriving litigants of their due process rights to sue in other courts might be all it takes to win their votes — not to mention the stink of the Sackler case.
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