Michael Winston was a high ranking executive who tried to blow the whistle at Countrywide Financial.

He was marginalized, and later fired by Bank of America after they took over the firm.

He filed suit, and was awarded $3.8 million dollars for wrongful termination.

Well, a few weeks after he described the rampant fraud and abuse on the Frontline piece, The Untouchables, the appeals court overturned the verdict based on the facts.

Now I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,^* but even I know that appeals courts are to rule on issues of law, not issues of fact.

It smells to high heaven, as the great Matt Taibbi observes:

When I spoke to him last week, Winston was still as amazed and repulsed by what he saw at Angelo Mozilo’s crooked subprime mortgage company as he was when he worked there. Winston, who had worked for years at high-level positions at companies like Motorola and Lockheed before joining Countrywide in the 2000s, described a moment in his first months at the company, when he rolled into the parking lot at the company headquarters.

………

When Winston refused, he was essentially stripped of his normal responsibilities and had his corporate budget slashed. When Bank of America took over the company, Winston’s job was terminated. He sued, and in one of the few positive outcomes for any white-collar whistleblower anywhere in the post-financial-crisis universe, won a $3.8 million wrongful termination suit against Bank of America last February.

Well, just weeks after the PBS documentary aired, the Court of Appeals in the state of California suddenly took an interest in Winston’s case. Normally, a court of appeals can only overturn a jury verdict in a case like this if there is a legal error. It’s not supposed to relitigate the factual evidence.

Yet this is exactly what happened: The court decided that the evidence that Winston was wrongfully terminated was insufficient, and then from there determined that the “legal error” in the original Winston suit against Bank of America and Countrywide was that the judge in the case failed to throw out the jury’s verdict:

In short, having scoured the record for evidence supporting the jury’s verdict on the issue of causation, we have found none. It follows that the trial court erred in denying defendants’ motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict.

The f%$#ing fix is f%$#ing in.

This is a deliberate attempt to chill the activities of any potential whistle blowers.

If this were an isolated incident, I might not assume corruption, but it is not an isolated case.

It seems to be an cultural imperative to punish whistle blowers, as was shown when the only person to go to jail in the UBS tax evasion case was the whistleblower.

I don’t know how this can be fixed, but it needs to be fixed.

^*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!