Houston Chronicle columnist Rick Casey today discusses Texas Courts’ historical price-tagging of the lives of our children. It’ll make your throat tighten up and your stomach turn.

Today’s Texas Supreme Court, which is nothing more than a bought-and-paid-for general counsel’s office for unaccountable corporations, has taken us back to dark says when children’s lives were priced like so much cabbage.

The reason is that for most of the 20th century, Texas law provided that juries could not compensate parents for a negligent act by someone else that caused one of the most intense of agonies, the loss of a child.
A 1947 case decided by the Beaumont Court of Appeals summed up the law and its disregard for sentiment.

“It is a well settled rule of law that a parent is entitled to recover as his actual damages for the death of a child the pecuniary value of the child’s services until he reaches his majority, less the cost and expense of the child’s support, education and maintenance, and such sums as might be reasonably expected as contributions after the child reaches majority,” the court ruled.

“(B)ut that no recovery may be had for mental anguish, grief, bereavement or loss of companionship, and it is well settled that some evidence of pecuniary loss is necessary to support a judgment of recovery.”

That inhuman legal precedent changed in 1983, when the Court allowed a family to be compensated for the terrible anguish that accompanies the loss of a child to the negligence of another. That seemed only just in a land where all are recognized as fully human equals, that is, we’re born without price tags on our toes.

But, as Casey said, the selfish special interests didn’t like being held accountable. Accountability and responsibility are for others. Usually, those others beneath them on the ladders of wealth and power.

Business interests won influence over the Legislature and the Texas Supreme Court and pressed tort reform measures. Now the pendulum has swung back with a variety of new laws and court rulings.

Even more twisted is the fact that the policy makers who have led the fight against accountability, who have tried to hammer closed the doors of justice, are the ones who claim moral superiority.