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L?Affaire Scruggs: Zach?s Latest Move and Dickie?s Bad Decade

By Ashby Jones

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scruggs Let’s round off this Wednesday with a couple quick hits from L’Affaire Scruggs.

Dickie Scruggs’s son, Zach, earlier this week asked Judge Neal Biggers to dismiss his indictment on grounds that co-defendant Tim Balducci and FBI agent William Delaney lied to the grand jury. Delaney and Balducci told a grand jury that Zach Scruggs knew about and agreed with a scheme to bribe a state court judge in exchange for a specific court order. But Scruggs the younger said the evidence - a conversation Balducci recorded at the Scruggs Law firm - does not back their testimony.

“It has been clear since the filing of this indictment that the government has no credible evidence that [Zach Scruggs] knowingly participated in any scheme to bribe a judge,” says the motion. Click here for a story from the Biloxi Sun-Herald.

How badly has Dickie Scruggs’s career gone in the last decade, post-tobacco? Pretty badly, writes Susan Beck in the March American Lawyer. The matters he’s taken on in the past decade “were much ballyhooed in the press, but in the end they shared two things: big enemies and bad results.” He filed a class-action RICO suit against the HMO industry in 1999 which largely went nowhere; brought claims against welding-rod makers which have largely been fruitless and in 2004, filed a handful of RICO lawsuits against non-profit hospitals, “every one of which,” Beck writes, was dismissed on the pleadings. “Even if Scruggs is exonerated [on the bribery charges],” she continues, “it may be hard for him to revive a career marked recently by good intentions and disappointing results.”