The Price of Justice

This nonfiction legalthriller traces the fourteen-year struggle of two lawyers to bring themost powerful coal baron in American history to justice.

Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy since the early1990s, ran an industry that provides nearly half of America's electric power.But wealth and influence weren't enough for Blankenship and his company, asthey set about destroying corporate and personal rivals, challenging theConstitution, purchasing the West Virginia… (more)

This nonfiction legalthriller traces the fourteen-year struggle of two lawyers to bring themost powerful coal baron in American history to justice.

Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy since the early1990s, ran an industry that provides nearly half of America's electric power.But wealth and influence weren't enough for Blankenship and his company, asthey set about destroying corporate and personal rivals, challenging theConstitution, purchasing the West Virginia judiciary, and willfullydisregarding safety standards in the company's mines--mines in which scores diedunnecessarily.

As Blankenship hobnobbed with a West Virginia Supreme Courtjustice in France, his company polluted the drinking water of hundreds ofcitizens; he himself fostered baroque vendettas against anyone who daredchallenge his sovereignty over coal country. Just about the only thing thatstood in the way of Blankenship's tyranny over a state and an industry was apair of odd-couple attorneys, Dave Fawcett and Bruce Stanley, who undertook alegal quest to bring justice to this corner of America. From the backwoodscourtrooms of West Virginia they pursued their case all the way to the USSupreme Court and to a dramatic decision declaring that the wealthy andpowerful are not entitled to purchase their own brand of law.

The Price of Justice is a story of corporate corruption sofar-reaching and devastating it could have been written a hundred years ago byIda Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens. And as Laurence Leamer demonstrates in thiscaptivating tale, because it's true, it's scarier than fiction.