Victory against CPSC: Oklahoma entrepreneur successfully defends ‘Podster’
When Jamie Leach got the news that the Consumer Product Safety Commission was coming after her business, she imagined a years-long legal battle in the Commission’s in-house tribunal, enormous legal fees, and a devastating blow to her company’s otherwise-sterling reputation. Even if she managed to win, the ordeal could have buried her business. But Jamie isn’t a quitter, so she fought anyway.
The CPSC claimed that Leachco’s Podster—an infant lounger designed to provide parents and caregivers a safe, supervised place for infants—was “defective” because it was “reasonably foreseeable” that parents and caregivers might ignore express warnings against unsafe sleep practices.
Jamie, of course, knew that the Podster was safe when used properly.
But it wasn’t long before the mounting costs of the litigation became unsustainable, and she was forced to consider giving up and caving to the CPSC’s demands. Then she found Pacific Legal Foundation, which took her case and has represented her free of charge throughout the last two years of her fight against baseless charges in a constitutionally defective process.
Enforcement actions before the CPSC’s in-house tribunal, unlike the courts you learned about in civics class, aren’t overseen by independent judges. They don’t have the fixed rules of evidence and procedure that were developed over centuries to protect the rights of Americans. And these cases won’t be decided by a jury of one’s peers, as the Seventh Amendment of the Constitution requires. Instead, the hearing is overseen by an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) who is an employee of the executive branch, rules that favor the Commission, and no jury.
This month, against the odds, Jamie won her case in the in-house tribunal. Even the Administrative Law Judge wasn’t persuaded by the CPSC’s case. He concluded that the CPSC failed to prove that the Podster has any defect and that, regardless, the CPSC failed to show that any defect created a substantial risk of injury to the public.
But mere days after the ALJ soundly rebuked the CPSC’s claims, the government announced it would appeal the ALJ’s ruling… to the full Commission. That’s right: In this Kafkaesque “court,” CPSC enforcement lawyers get to appeal the loss to CPSC commissioners who voted to initiate the case in the first place.
The CPSC’s in-house tribunal is a constitutional abomination. That’s why Leachco, with PLF’s help, separately filed an action in federal court against the CPSC to stop the Commission’s constitutionally deficient enforcement process. Every American has a right to a fair trial before an impartial judge and a jury of their peers when the government accuses them of wrongdoing. Jamie is fighting to vindicate those rights, not just for herself, but for all of us.
The costs of defending oneself in an agency’s home “court” while simultaneously prosecuting a federal-court action to vindicate constitutional norms are too high for anyone but the largest companies to bear on their own. That’s where PLF’s donors come in. Our donors enable us to take cases like Jamie’s—along with hundreds of others at any given time—free-of-charge. Without PLF’s donors, people like Jamie may not have any choice but to give in to the government’s demands. And that would leave all of us less free.
