Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox imposed a lifetime ban on businessman Roger Pleasant from engaging in medical marketing after a jury ruled the 57-year-old Maumelle man's business operations and employees repeatedly violated the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
The judge also fined Pleasant and his co-defendants $26,000 based on jury findings that they had broken the marketing law 13 times over a five-year span between June 2009 and June 2014. State lawyers had argued that the defendants together had violated the law at least 50 times.
Fox set the fine at $2,000 per violation. The law provides for fines of up to $10,000 per violation.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Shawn Johnson told jurors in his closing arguments that the defendants had deliberately deceived injured victims while they were vulnerable in the immediate aftermath of a traffic accident, all for the love of money.
The evidence showed that Pleasant had earned more than $1 million from one chiropractor who paid him $600 for every qualified patient Pleasant could persuade to start treatment.
Johnson, with co-counsel Jennifer Craun, urged jurors to hold Pleasant responsible for the misdeeds of the people working for him.
"They received their marching orders from him," Johnson said, describing testimony about how Pleasant and his son trained the telemarketers.
"They followed his script."
Pleasant and the men still face further financial penalties. The deceptive practices law allows state attorneys to ask the judge to force the defendants to reimburse the state for pursuing the two-year litigation.
The Arkansas attorney general's office sued in June 2014 to curb Pleasant's activities based on consumer complaints that -- while marketing medical services, chiefly for chiropractors -- he and his representatives were dishonest with potential patients about who the marketers were, what kind of treatment they were offering and how much it cost.
The consumer-protection suit was initiated by then-Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and carried on by his successor, Leslie Rutledge.
"Roger Pleasant harassed and deceived Arkansans, and today the attorney general is grateful that he is being held accountable for those actions," Rutledge spokesman Judd Deere said.
"Pleasant and his employees lied to consumers, harassed them over the phone, at home and their workplace, and coerced them into visiting chiropractors from whom he was making a profit.
"These Arkansans were victims not only from an accident, but from the actions of Mr. Pleasant," Deere said.
Pleasant, whose lawyers described him as a leading reformer in the field, testified that the filing of the lawsuit was enough to drive him out of marketing, saying the accusations destroyed his business. He told jurors he now works as a process server.
The court-ordered ban encompasses five companies that state attorneys said Pleasant operated or controlled between June 2009 and June 2014: Information and Discovery Inc., PSG and Investigation LLC, Accident Claim Service LLC, Physician 1st Marketing Group LLC, and Network Collision Group LLC. State records show those companies are defunct.
State lawyers asked the judge to extend the ban to the two co-defendants who had worked for Pleasant.
But the judge declined, saying there was no evidence that Little Rock brothers James "Jimmy" Hinton, 47, and Brian Lavelle Hinton, 50, continued to work in the field and that new regulations on chiropractors that require their marketers to be licensed seemed to be a sufficient deterrent to bad behavior.
The eight men and four women of the jury deliberated about four hours on Thursday to end the three-day trial.
Jurors had to return 11 verdicts to decide whether Pleasant, his 33-year-old son, the Hinton brothers and two of Pleasant's companies had broken the deceptive-trade law and how many violations they had committed.
The jury also had to decide whether the senior Pleasant had controlled his co-defendants and knew or should have known they were engaging in illegal behavior.
The panel unanimously cleared Pleasant's son, Rogerick Pleasant, and one of the companies, Network Collision, of wrongdoing.
Jurors found Roger Pleasant responsible for eight of the 21 violations the state accused him of; Jimmy Hinton, three of 17 violations; and one violation each for Accident Claim and Brian Hinton, who had been accused of four and five violations, respectively.
The law leaves the decision to bar Roger Pleasant and his companies from the medical marketing field as well as the amount of the fines up to the judge.
On behalf of the Pleasants, defense attorney Willard Proctor called on jurors to clear the men, saying the case against father and son was as inedible as a cake made with spoiled milk and rotten eggs.
"It is sour. It is spoiled. It is bad," he said, his voice rising. "You can't use it."
The "crucial" evidence that should clear his clients were the waivers patients had to sign before receiving treatment, stating they had been contacted by the doctor's paid representatives with no connection to an insurance company or attorney, he told jurors.
The document also states that the patients have not been paid in exchange for receiving treatment, he told jurors.
"It's an affidavit. This blows the state's case up," he said.
Agather McKeel, the attorney for the Hinton brothers, told jurors that her clients were bringing medical services to people who needed it, each of whom had the opportunity to "choose, use or refuse" what the men were offering, she said.
The only client of Roger Pleasant's to testify, for the state, was Dr. Heath Delane Lenox, the owner of Markham Injury Center.
State Board of Chiropractic Examiners records, which were not disclosed to jurors, show that Lenox has been fined $24,000 and his license is currently on probation, chiefly because of complaints about how his marketers operated.
Lenox accepted the penalties, which put him on probation for three years, in June 2015, according to the records obtained through the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
The records show the board's investigation substantiated 10 of 12 complaints against him brought by potential patients over the tactics used by procurers who were acting on his behalf.
Lenox presented payment records showing he'd paid Pleasant $1,047,800 for patient recruitment.
Roger Pleasant told jurors he paid his workers anywhere from half to a third of the per-patient pay he received from his chiropractor clients.
Metro on 10/07/2016