Battle Lost, War Won

Thinking in large, impressive figures, as is his habit, Negligence Lawyer Melvin Belli asked a million dollars for his clients. Belli was representing the widow and children of William Kapell, the brilliant 31 -year-old pianist killed in an air crash in 1953 while returning home from Australia. At the trial in 1961, Belli bolstered his argument with a lustrous array of musical talent to testify to Kapell's genius and high earning power -- Rudolf Serkin, Artur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski. But before the jury could award a penny, it had to decide on liability, and on that question the musicians were no help at all. The jury found no negligence, never even considered an award.

But courtroom defeats are not necessarily final. Belli promptly requested that the presiding judge overrule the jury on the question of liability and or der a new trial to determine damages.

By a rare coincidence, the judge happened to be Willis W. Ritter, who normally sits in the federal district court in Salt Lake City. Since that court's docket is relatively uncrowded, Ritter occasionally sits in other districts as a visiting judge. In San Francisco two years before, he had presided over an other damage-suit trial that resulted from the same British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines crash that killed Kapell.

Then, too, the plaintiffs' lawyer was Mel Belli. Then, too, the jury awarded no damages. But Ritter ordered a new trial, and the second time around, Belli's clients got $51,000.

In Kapell's case, Ritter brooded for two more years, finally decided last June that the Commonwealth Pacific pilot had been guilty of willful misconduct. In a massive opinion mailed to New York from Salt Lake City, the judge ruled that the Australian airline Qantas, which had since largely absorbed British Commonwealth, was liable for damages. He ordered a new trial.

That trial took place last week in Manhattan.Ill and preoccupied with the Jack Ruby defense, Lawyer Belli remained home in San Francisco. New York lawyers conducted a chorus of musical witnesses again, and this time the jury was abundantly impressed. After a three-day trial, it awarded Kapell's estate $924,396.

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