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Esmia
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| Joined: | Fri Jan 16th, 2009 |
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Posted: Fri Aug 21st, 2009 10:04 am |
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Because she worked as a Embassy secretary for the State Department, Lucille Burkhardt had lived in many exotic places. After a few years in one out-of- the-way country, she would receive instructions to move to another or, occasionally, to return to Washington, D.C. She was unmarried. Her two dogs and, even more, her two African Grey Parrots were her family, and they provided the companionship, love, and stability that she needed to settle happily in a succession of dusty capitals.
In 1992, Lucille received a notice that she had been posted to a tiny West African country. She dutifully packed her belongings and carefully readied her family for the two day flight from Virginia to West Africa, with an overnight stop in Paris. Without apprehension, she kissed them all goodbye and delivered them to the airline. She said that she would see them in Paris. The next afternoon at Charles de Gaulle Airport, just outside Paris, the airline reported that both her African Greys had vanished in their cages somewhere between Virginia and Paris. Frantic, she demanded a thorough search. But neither her parrots nor their cages were found that day, or the next ... or ever. As Lucille forced herself to board the last flight, she vowed that she would find them. From West Africa, she enlisted animal welfare organizations in the United States to help.
They tried, unsuccessfully, for two years. Finally, though she lived on the modest salary of a public servant, she contacted an animal rights attorney in Boston. He listened to her story. A parrot, he said, was considered baggage, as was every nonhuman animal. Under the Warsaw Convention that governed the loss of baggage on international flights, she was entitled to damages of about nine dollars a pound, and no more. But she wasn't interested in money; she wanted her parrots back. Strongly suspecting that they might have been stolen by baggage handlers, her lawyer decided to sue the airline in federal court and use the discovery process to determine who had handled the parrots and at what point they might have been stolen.
Then they might have a chance to recover them. Suit could have been filed in Virginia, Washington, D.C., Delaware, Chicago, or even Paris. For tactical reasons he chose Chicago and retained a local attorney to help. Then they were assigned Judge Paxton. From the beginning, he viewed the case of the stolen parrots with enormous disdain. It was a monumental insignificance that cluttered his docket and he did not intend to tolerate it. He decided to rid himself of the case as soon as possible. Barely had the crucial discovery process begun when the judge's clerk telephoned the Boston attorney.
Appear, she demanded, in Judge Paxton's courtroom on the very next day. And the judge would not accept the appearance of the local Chicago attorney in his place, either. Because of other commitments, the lawyer could not fly to Chicago for two days. When he appeared, the enraged judge threatened to hold him in contempt, then presented him with a Hobson's choice.
He could settle Lucille Burkhardt's claim for whatever the airline wished to pay or appear in his courtroom each and every day thereafter to explain why the case still remained alive. In the corridor, the airline's attorney offered $1,250, little more than the cost of airfare. A couple days later, it reluctantly raised the offer another two hundred and fifty dollars.
The angry attorney flew home, ashamed to tell Louise that she had been robbed again by a vindictive judge in the country that she represented half a world away and that she would never re-establish her family. The next morning he woke her in West Africa with a telephone call. Settled.
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