March 11, 2005

Last month a South Carolina jury found Christopher Pittman guilty of murdering his grandparents, rejecting his claim that the antidepressant Zoloft had distorted his judgment. As we noted last fall, a distinctive feature of the case was that civil litigators who've pursued product liability claims against Pfizer, the drug's maker, stepped forward to provide Pittman with criminal defense representation, presumably aware of the potential crossover effect on civil cases of advancing the blame-the-drug premise in a criminal context.