U.S. TAKES PUNISHING VIEW OF ACCIDENTS

Some things are self-evident. Some things suffer from analysis.

The concept of recklessness, for example. Recklessness is dangerous behavior undertaken for trivial reasons with careless disregard for consequences. Recklessness is driving a car blindfolded for the thrill of it, shooting a gun at random targets, dumping produced brine into a trout stream. Recklessness is intentional, stupid, destructive.

Recklessness is not an essential precursor to accidents. Not all auto wrecks result from reckless driving. Weapons can discharge without their bearers' intending them to. Brine can leak from tanks. In most accidents, someone can be shown to have been at least partly at fault: failing to see a red light, forgetting to unload a rifle, leaving open a valve. But there's a difference between those types of errors and utter recklessness.

An Anchorage jury's refusal to make distinctions along these lines may cost Exxon Corp. $15 billion. The jury last week found the company reckless in the Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska in 1989, subjecting it to that much in punitive damages. Contrary to the sophomoric bluster of plaintiff's attorney Brian O'Neill, $15 billion is a huge amount even to Exxon-nearly half the giant company's stockholders' equity.

But that's Exxon's problem. The problem for the oil and gas industry and for companies large and small within it is a legal system acting more and more like a mercenary lynch mob. The sympathetic tendency of juries to favor individuals over institutions, such as companies, has become lucrative business for alleged victims and their attorneys. So, increasingly, doing business in the U.S. means betting the company-or a significant piece of it-against the risk of having an accident or otherwise victimizing anyone.

This is not to say that accidents don't create victims or that victims should not be compensated; to the contrary, that is the purpose of civil law. In the Exxon Valdez case, the company made no effort to dodge responsibility or to escape compensation to individuals and businesses hurt by the spill. It made a mistake that created harm, and it should pay. The problem for Exxon and every other company operating in the U.S. is abuse of the system that is supposed to assure everyone involved of justice.

"A company as large as Exxon thinks that it is above the law," O'Neill declared after the jury ruled the company reckless. "You need to take a substantial bite out of their butt before they change their behavior." The implication of this charming commentary is that Exxon will keep smashing tankers onto rocks if he and his 10,000 clients do not extract $15 billion from Exxon, beyond a possible $1.5 billion in compensatory damages and what the company already has paid to spill victims, to apportion among themselves. What nonsense.

WHAT'S RECKLESS?

Such use of the world's finest legal system is more reckless than anything Exxon or Joseph Hazelwood ever thought about doing with the ill-fated Exxon Valdez. And, to repeat, it threatens every company that operates-and therefore risks having accidents-in the U.S.

At the core of Exxon's recklessness, according to O'Neill and the jury, was allowing Hazelwood to remain in command of tankers in spite of his history of alcohol problems. Yet in a different context, this might have been seen as humanitarianism. In fact, it's not difficult to imagine Hazelwood's suing Exxon if the company had tried to keep him off the bridge. If punitive damages had seemed at all likely, he certainly would have had no trouble finding an attorney willing to stretch the analysis for all it was worth in court.