23536
Bluelight Crew
Keith Allen Brown shot a man to death in Priest Lake five years ago, leading to a 15-year prison sentence. But the 52-year-old says his problems started long before that, when he was just a boy and tasted alcohol for the first time.
Brown and four other inmates at Idaho’s Kuna facility are suing major beer companies, blaming their crimes on alcoholism and claiming that the companies are responsible because they don’t warn consumers that their products are addictive.
The Idaho inmates do not have attorneys and drafted the lawsuit themselves. It names eight defendants, including Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller Brewing and the owner of Jim Beam whiskey, American Brands.
Brown and co-plaintiffs Jeremy Joseph Brown, Cory Alan Baugh, Woodrow John Grant and Steven Todd Thompson wrote affidavits explaining how alcohol has affected their lives.
Brown, who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Bonner County in 2010 after fleeing to Florida, said he’s spent nearly 30 years in prison.
“I have spent a great deal of that time in prison because of situations that have arose because of people being drunk, or because of situations in which alcohol played a major role,” Brown wrote. “At no time in my life, prior to me becoming an alcoholic, was I ever informed that alcohol was habit forming and addictive.”
That argument was the crux of class-action lawsuits against major tobacco companies in the 1990s, which led to stronger warning labels and restrictions on advertising for cigarettes and other tobacco products.
Jeremy Brown, 34, is serving a 20- to 30-year sentence for a 2001 shooting in Latah County that seriously injured a man. He said that he was drunk at the time and that if he’d not been an alcoholic, “the shooting would never happened.”
He said he never would have started drinking if he knew it was habit forming.
Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/01/02/2398402/inmates-the-beer-made-me-do-it.html#storylink=cpy
Brown and four other inmates at Idaho’s Kuna facility are suing major beer companies, blaming their crimes on alcoholism and claiming that the companies are responsible because they don’t warn consumers that their products are addictive.
The Idaho inmates do not have attorneys and drafted the lawsuit themselves. It names eight defendants, including Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller Brewing and the owner of Jim Beam whiskey, American Brands.
Brown and co-plaintiffs Jeremy Joseph Brown, Cory Alan Baugh, Woodrow John Grant and Steven Todd Thompson wrote affidavits explaining how alcohol has affected their lives.
Brown, who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Bonner County in 2010 after fleeing to Florida, said he’s spent nearly 30 years in prison.
“I have spent a great deal of that time in prison because of situations that have arose because of people being drunk, or because of situations in which alcohol played a major role,” Brown wrote. “At no time in my life, prior to me becoming an alcoholic, was I ever informed that alcohol was habit forming and addictive.”
That argument was the crux of class-action lawsuits against major tobacco companies in the 1990s, which led to stronger warning labels and restrictions on advertising for cigarettes and other tobacco products.
Jeremy Brown, 34, is serving a 20- to 30-year sentence for a 2001 shooting in Latah County that seriously injured a man. He said that he was drunk at the time and that if he’d not been an alcoholic, “the shooting would never happened.”
He said he never would have started drinking if he knew it was habit forming.
Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/01/02/2398402/inmates-the-beer-made-me-do-it.html#storylink=cpy
