Lawyer shocked witness with electric novelty pen

Lawyer shocked witness with electric novelty pen

May 13, 2014 3:51 PM


It was a courtroom stunt that could have gone well, proving the plaintiffs’ point, or it could have gone badly, angering the judge, misleading the jury, and leading to a mistrial, which is pretty much how it went down.

In an October 2013, a Utah trial in which dairy farmers complained that stray currents emitted by an Intermountain Power Plant facility are harmful to cattle, the lawyer for the farmers, California attorney Don Howarth, decided to do a little show and tell with one of the expert witnesses.

Georgia Tech professor Athanasios Meliopoulos was on the stand testifying against the farmers, saying that the 1.5 volts emitted by the power plant couldn’t even be felt by a person, much less a cow. So Howarth produced a joy buzzer joke pen that used a 1.5 volt AAA battery to deliver a “funny” shock to whoever tried to use the pen.

In court Howarth dared Meliopoulos to push the button on the pen, “go ahead and push the back of the pen and tell the jury whether you feel it or not,” which he did, expecting a 1.5 volt shock. If only…

Instead the witness reportedly “received a strong electric shock, which caused his body to jerk and to drop the pen,” because, according to Fourth District Judge James Brady, the pen has a transformer that ups the output to a whopping 750 volts.

In an order released this week, Brady added that the packaging also has a warning against using the pen on anyone over 60, like Meliopoulos, or in poor health, and that Howarth did not ascertain the age or health of the witness before proceeding with his demonstration.

“Witnesses … are called up to answer questions,” he wrote. “To add a requirement that they do this in a physically hostile environment where they may be subjected to electrical shocks without warning is far removed from the decorum and professionalism required by attorneys, and has no place in a court room.”

Brady agreed with arguments made by lawyers for the defense that Howarth’s stunt deliberately misled the jury.

The jury was released in November 2013, without a verdict, and a mistrial declared in the case, due to an unrelated issue. Howarth will be barred from cross-examining any IPP witnesses in the next trial, and he was ordered to pay$1,000 to the witness, and $2,000 to the defendant for what Brady concluded was “battery on a witness.”