Jerry Mitchell writes about Ed Peters and Eaton v. Frisby

Possibly the best part of  Jerry Mitchell’s story about Ed Peters and Eaton v. Frisby may be Larry Latham’s reaction to Ed Peters’s FBI statement.

One of the ways that Ed Peters influenced Judge DeLaughter was to (behind the scenes) convince him to fire special master Jack Dunbar, who had made findings that were devastating to Eaton Corp. on the question of whether it was implicated in the effort to conceal a contract with a fact witness.  Peters suggested the hiring of Larry Latham as a new special master.  When Latham realized in January of 2008 that he was possibly being gamed by Peters, he immediately reported this to the court and stepped aside.

On hearing Peters’s account of all this from his FBI 302, Latham’s response was “I’ll be damned.”

There’s some dissembling in the story from Eaton’s spokesperson.  Mitchell reports Judge Yerger’s finding

“The court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Eaton and its counsel were aware of and, in fact, sanctioned Peters’ clandestine actions, either through affirmation or inaction, with then-Judge DeLaughter, for Eaton’s benefit,” Yerger wrote in his order dismissing Eaton’s lawsuit against rival Frisby Aerospace.

Eaton officials have insisted they were victimized by Peters.

“The true victim is the justice system and its integrity,” concluded Yerger, who issued a $1.5 million sanction against Eaton for intentionally withholding records – a sanction upheld by the state Supreme Court.

Eaton is appealing the dismissal to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

“We didn’t ask Ed Peters to influence Bobby DeLaughter or anybody else in any way,” said Don McGrath, senior vice president of communications for Eaton.

It strikes me that the question isn’t whether Ed Peters, hired as a lawyer by Eaton, was supposed to influence the judge– after all, isn’t that what lawyers do?  The question is whether Peters (who was hired secretly and off the record, a fact Eaton’s legal pleadings keep omitting) was hired to improperly influence Judge DeLaughter.  Judge Yerger seems to have found as emphatically as he could that this was what Peters was hired to do and did.

Mitchell notes that there has been no move to prosecute Peters about Eaton, and quotes a law professor on the subject:

“It seems curious,” said Carl Tobias, professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. “Maybe federal prosecutors are just exercising discretion because he cooperated in the other case. Still he gets the advantage that others might not.”

Mitchell notes something not always reported about Peters:

He had spent much of his nearly three decades as a prosecutor dodging accusations of corruption and controversies. In 1975, a jury acquitted him on extortion charges.

At the end, the article quotes me, talking in part about the Middleton case, in which Peters admitted being hired by both the officer being prosecuted for manslaughter and one of the victims:

Oxford lawyer Tom Freeland, who has covered the case closely on his website, North Mississippi Commentor, nmisscommentor.com, said Peters’ statements “show a lot more about what was going on inside and how corrupt it was.”

Elsewhere in the FBI statement, Peters described how he had been approached by both sides in the same lawsuit involving a fatality.

“It’s totally unethical,” Freeland said. “Peters is on both sides of a transaction, hoping money shakes loose.”

What has surprised him is the Scruggs cases weren’t pursued by Mississippi prosecutors.

“These are state crimes, too,” Freeland said. “Both local and statewide prosecutors have left it alone.”

Mitchell went to the local prosecutor in Oxford for a comment about this.  Obviously, Eaton and Peters’s efforts to influence DeLaughter arose in Jackson and Hinds County.