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Donald Trump will be fined $10K a day until he signs a “Jackson affidavit,” named after a 1987 Bronx personal injury lawsuit.
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NJ attorney Eugene M. Banta is shocked that his longtime case, Jackson vs. NYC, the precedent is for Trump’s fine.
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“It’s just great for me,” he told Insider of the 35-year-old case he won just after law school.
It had been thirty years, and the ink had barely dried in law school, when Eugene M. Barta argued his first-ever appeal under the coffered wood ceilings of a Manhattan courtroom.
“I was happier than a pig in the mud,” he recalls his win.
But Barta never imagined that his victory in a minor personal injury case would set a significant precedent — and today ensnare a former president.
Donald Trump will be fined $10,000 a day for failing to comply with New York Attorney General Letitia James’s requirement to hand over business documents. The fine reached $110,000 Friday and will continue to rise until Trump signs a so-called “Jackson affidavit,” an affidavit, detailing his failed search for the documents James wants.
That’s Jackson, as in Barta’s old personal injury lawsuit, Jackson vs. the city of New York.
“All I could think of was the butterfly effect — something completely random,” he told Insider Friday, after learning of his unintended role in Trump’s spiraling fine.
“Years later, just over 30 years later, is just amazing for me,” added Barta, 66, now a commercial debt collection attorney with Heitner & Breitstein in Marlboro, NJ.
“Jackson vs. NYC” is named after Christophena Jackson, who was critically injured at age 64 when a staircase collapsed in her city-owned South Bronx apartment building in 1984.
First as a law student and then as a new lawyer, Barta helped his lawyer father, also named Eugene M. Barta, to fight for the woman. They fought the blockade of the city for nearly a decade.
“It was just one stall after another,” recalls Barta. “It was like pulling teeth to get documents.”
The city was unable to provide any maintenance or inspection reports for the Jackson building at 970 Prospect Avenue.
Instead, in 1990, she had a city employee sign an affidavit — an “affidavit” — stating in three short paragraphs that she had looked in the “Central Records” and the “Files” and found nothing.
Barta argued that the city shouldn’t just say, “We’ve looked, there’s nothing.” They should be penalized for failing to produce a single record.
The Court of Appeal agreed.
Here, after years of delay, the affidavit filed by the city did not show where the documents in question were likely to be kept, what efforts, if any, were made to preserve them, whether such documents were routinely destroyed, or whether a search had been carried out at every location where the data was likely to be found,” the appeals court said in its ruling.
In summary, the affidavit provided no basis for the court to determine that the search had been thorough or conducted in good faith to provide this necessary information to the plaintiff.
The court ruled that any potential jury in the case would be told to assume that the city indeed knew about the dilapidated stairwell in advance and failed to fix it.
And the 1992 decision became case law that now costs Trump $10,000 a day.
In dozens of New York cases since Barta’s victory, when people or companies or governments fail to submit court documents, judges have demanded “Jackson affidavits,” affidavits specifying where the documents should have been, what was done to preserve them, and “whether a search was performed at each location where the records were likely to be found.”
Exactly the kind of affidavit now being demanded of Trump, who is appealing the fine and contempt of court.
“I thought I had a pretty good case,” Barta recalled Friday. “But I had no idea Jackson’s affidavit was named after my Mrs. Jackson from 35 years ago,” he said. “That’s been the standard for almost 40 years, which is pretty funny.”
Barta refused to talk about Trump, or Trump’s fine. But he was very happy to talk about Christophena Jackson, whom he still fondly remembers.
“She came into the office once or twice,” he said. ‘A very nice, older woman. She was rightfully injured. She just wanted to be compensated for falling down the stairs.’
He does not remember the settlement that the city finally entered into in 1994 for Jackson, who was then about 75 years old. “We’ve negotiated a bit,” he said, laughing about his negotiations with the city.
“She reminded me of my grandmother,” he added. “And I just thought she was a sweet old lady.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
