◆ SpookStack

Nos. 77-1698, 77-1210 & 77-1370 89 appellate treatment of directed verdicts. At the risk of over-simplification, they are not favored by the law and the judgments based thereon will be reversed when the evidence reflects that reasonable persons in a fair and impartial exercise of their judgment may draw different conclusions therefrom. Thus it would seem that if the 37,000 pages reasonably exhibited a basis for different conclusions, the resulting decisional opinion, unless it were designed to serve some other purpose than its primary one of disposing of the case, could be of fairly short length. Alternatively, of course, if there is difficul- ty in finding a solid base in the monumental record we have here for different conclusions under the applicable law, the effort to reverse might necessarily achieve ex- tensive proportions. In any event, Judge Swygert’s opin- ion has added to the bulk more than 125 typed pages. The matter of a proper perspective is further made difficult by the diverse approaches of the parties which I might have assumed before becoming involved in the case was to recover monetary damages for claimed wrongs visited upon them by the state and federal defendants. From my evaluation of their briefs and oral arguments, however, there is not this single-minded pur- suit. One group of plaintiffs, whom for convenience of reference I will call the Hampton plaintiffs, consists of the Administratrix of the Fred Hampton estate, Hamp- ton’s girlfriend and the mother of his posthumously born child, and two other persons. Of the four Hampton plaintiffs, three were present in the apartment at the time the raid occurred and two of the three were wound- ed. The fourth Hampton plaintiff is the personal alain of one of the two persons killed in the raid. While the compact original brief filed by the attorney for the Hampton plaintiffs does purport to incorporate by ‘reference most of the issues and _ supporting arguments advanced by the remaining plaintiffs (with the exception of those dealing with the bias and prej- udice of the trial judge and his failure to recuse himself), this brief “relates to the directed verdict granted, following the dismissal of the jury as dis-