Was Justice Paralyzed?

It never changed. time and again, it was monotonous yet riveting, tedious yet fascinating. Whether it was played in slow motion or with a frame frozen on the screen, the one-minute videotape, run and rerun, never failed to be affecting.

Judge John Hamilton Smith of the County Court of Common Pleas in Charleston, S.C., sat transfixed, watching the little monitor on the bench in front of him. The 12 jurors leaned forward and the attorneys stopped shuffling their papers and sat staring at one of the three large TV screens placed about the courtroom. Now and then some of them would glance at the 21-year-old man sitting in the wheelchair, looking for some reaction from him—a grimace of memory, a wince of recollection—but there was nothing. He stared stonily at the screen, as if watching someone else getting hurt out there, as if seeing the crippling of another man.

The videotape showed a single play in an otherwise insignificant college football game played on Oct. 26, 1985, between two ordinary teams. East Tennessee State and The Citadel. As the tape began, the ball was snapped and quarterback Keith Harris of East Tennessee State faked a hand-off to his fullback up the middle. Turning, Harris pitched the ball back to running back Herman Jacobs, who turned upheld in full stride. The Citadel's middle linebacker, Marc Buoniconti, after fighting free of one blocker, cut left across the field to head off Jacobs.

But outside linebacker Joel Thompson got to Jacobs first, met him head-on, and dived at his legs. Jacobs flipped over and tumbled forward. Buoniconti, almost in front of Jacobs, suddenly turned toward him, lowered his torso until it was parallel to the ground, and dived into the pinwheeling running back.

That was when Buoniconti's head crashed into Jacobs, and, Buoniconti would say later, when he felt his body go slack. He rolled over and saw an arm lying in front of him. "I saw it was connected to my body," he said in court. "If I hadn't seen it connected, I wouldn't have known it was mine."

It's impossible to tell from the videotape precisely what part of Buoniconti's head struck Jacobs's back or left hip. What is clear, according to the X-rays, is that Buoniconti suffered what doctors describe as "a complete bilateral facet dislocation" between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.

In lay terms, the blow broke Buoniconti's neck, bending it to the point that the third vertebra became dislodged from the fourth vertebra beneath it, crushing the spinal cord. The injury occurred when Buoniconti was a 19-year-old sophomore at The Citadel, and since that moment he has been a quadriplegic, unable to move anything but his head.

The videotape became the most crucial and compelling item of evidence in a five-week civil trial in which Buoniconti sought $22.8 million in actual damages from Dr. E.K. Wallace Jr., The Citadel's team physician, on the grounds that Wallace was negligent in advising and treating Buoniconti. But the six men and six women on the jury didn't see it that way. After meeting for just three hours, including a half-hour stretch at the start of their deliberations in which they were heard screaming at one another behind closed doors, the jurors found that Wallace was not liable at all and awarded Buoniconti nothing.

(Two weeks earlier the Amerisure Co., which was insuring two other defendants, The Citadel and team trainer Andy Clawson, ordered the school's attorneys—reportedly against the attorneys' advice—to offer Buoniconti $800,000 in an out-of-court settlement, which Buoniconti accepted. Because of a court-imposed gag order, the jury was not aware of the settlement, but Clawson and The Citadel, a 146-year-old military college in Charleston with an enrollment of 2,000, were removed as defendants in the suit, and Wallace became the sole defendant.)

Thus Wallace alone was exonerated at the close of a trial during which experts, viewing the same X-rays, videotapes and medical records, disagreed as to what this evidence meant. Buoniconti's lawyers charged that their client's injury was the result of Wallace's negligent advice and care; that Buoniconti had spinal abnormalities when he enrolled at The Citadel but was never told about them; that he had entered the East Tennessee State game hurt and in pain; and that Wallace had allowed him to play in equipment, designed by Clawson but approved by Wallace, that placed his neck in a position that made it vulnerable to being broken.