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Judging from the Christmas-card photo that the Caperton family sent out this past December, one would conclude that this must be a bountiful time for the handsome family. The picture had been taken a few months earlier, for Mrs. Kathy Caperton's fiftieth-birthday celebration, at the Greennbrier Hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Fifty-five-year-old Hugh Caperton, in his tuxedo, seemed the fair-haired exemplar of the American dream. Preston and Jessica, their two thirteen-year-old daughters, sported their first high heels. No one would have any idea that the genial Caperton was going through one of the most extraordinary legal sagas in modern American history.
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Thirteen years before, Caperton’s coal mine declared bankruptcy after its main client, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, stopped purchasing Caperton’s coal. Caperton believed that Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, had with calculation and forethought driven his small company to destruction. Massey claimed that Caperton was a spoiled, feckless, reckless businessman whose misconduct had willed his own destruction. Against all kinds of advice, Caperton decided to sue the company headed by the most powerful coal mogul in a century. He found two young, immensely talented young attorneys to take his case on a contingency basis, David Fawcett and Bruce Stanley. As for Massey, they hired a team of the top coal industry attorneys who defended their clients with seemingly limitless funds, determination and skill.
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The legal struggle ranged from the state courts in Virginia and West Virginia to the federal courts and the United States Supreme Court. This was not a bloodless civil suit but proceedings that consumed the lives of most who took part. It became in the end a personal struggle between Caperton and his attorneys and Blankenship and his team.
Caperton and his company won $50 million in the West Virginia courts, but the verdict was thrown out by the West Virginia Supreme Court. The court had to vote again when photos surfaced showing Blankenship and Justice Elliott "Spike" Maynard off on vacation in France with their girlfriends when the case was before the high court. Blankenship was so angry at the revelations that when ABC News approached him, he stuck his hand in front of the camera and warned the reporters that they might be shot. In the end, the court voted against Caperton again. This time he took the case to the United States Supreme Court where Ted Olson, the former solicitor general, argued that Blankenship had no right to spend over $3 million to elect a justice that would in essence do his biding. In an historic judgment that galvanized the movement to reform the election of justices, the court ruled that a plaintiff in a lawsuit cannot open his checkbook to elect a judge who will likely vote in his favor. But for the third time Caperton lost in the West Virginia Supreme Court. Caperton has filed another suit in the Virginia courts, and the case continues.
Over these years, Fawcett and Stanley have become the spearheads of an immense legal challenge against Massey, winning hundreds of millions of dollars and helping to create a media onslaught against the man Rolling Stone calls “The Dark Lord of Coal Country.” In April 2010, 29 men died in a Massey operation in West Virginia, the worst mining disaster in forty years. If not for the efforts of Caperton and his attorneys, Blankenship might have survived the bad publicity. But he was forced to resign and the company he devoted his life to building was sold to Alpha Energy.
The Price of Justice is the story of this battle. If you know anything about this case or about Massey Energy pro or con, please email me at Leamer@leamer.com. Thanks.
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