A couple — Thomas Asprey and Leslie Glustrom — sued Peabody Energy for civil rights violations after they were arrested for holding a banner during the company’s annual shareholders meeting. I’d guess that the cop who arrested them is more at fault than the energy company whose bidding he was doing. But, whatever, I wasn’t there.
The introduction to Asprey and Glustrom’s complaint against Peabody included lyrics from John Prine’s song “Paradise.” I’m not familiar with it because it includes the kind of twangy-twang-plus-banjo that I’m sure features heavily on the soundtrack of Hell, but it’s apparently well known. It’s about coal mining in Kentucky and the exploitation thereof. Peabody is named-checked in the song, making it apropos for a legal complaint about Peabody crushing the rights of ordinary citizens.
Peabody objected to these lyrics included in the complaint:
“And Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
“Down by the Green River where paradise lay?”
“Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away”
And then in an almost cartoonishly evil and tone-deaf move, Peabody filed a motion to strike the song lyrics from the complaint. That’s right, in a lawsuit about speech, Peabody Energy wants to strike song lyrics from the record. Donald Trump doesn’t look as thin-skinned as Peabody Energy does here.
In response to Peabody’s motion to strike, lawyers for Asprey and Glustrom filed a pretty brilliant response letter:
Defendant Peabody Energy Corporation has paid its lawyers thousands of dollars to submit a 17 page brief in support of its four page Motion to Strike song lyrics from the Complaint because, it says, it wants to “save time and money spent litigating issues that will not affect the outcome of the case,” and it wants “to avoid the expenditure of time and money that must arise from litigating spurious issues by dispensing with those issues prior to trial.”
It’s a song. A song can’t hurt Peabody, and recitation of a portion of the song will not cause Peabody undue difficulty or expense, except that which is self-inflicted. No portion of the Complaint contains any material that is improper or irrelevant, and none of it will increase the cost or complexity of this litigation. Mr. Prine’s poetry will not likely confuse anyone, and Peabody would suffer no undue harm if it chose to simply ignore the introduction and related
materials it now seeks to censor.
It’s worth reading the whole thing. There’s a whole section titled “Non-Traditional Legal Writing is Good”
And, just to ensure Peabody’s shame, I present John Prine’s Paradise:
