John Edwards

Johnny Reid Edwards (born June 10, 1953) is an American lawyer and former politician who served as a U.S. senator from North Carolina.

Edwards was born on June 10, 1953, to Wallace Reid Edwards and Catharine Juanita "Bobbie" Edwards (née Wade) in Seneca, South Carolina.

The family moved several times during Edwards's childhood, eventually settling in Robbins, North Carolina, where his father worked as a textile mill floor worker and was eventually promoted to supervisor.

His mother had a roadside antique-finishing business and then worked as a letter carrier when his father left his job.

The family attended a Baptist church.

A football star in high school, Edwards was the first person in his family to attend college.

He attended Clemson University for one semester before transferring to North Carolina State University.

He graduated from NCSU with high honors with a bachelor's degree in textile technology and a 3.8 GPA in 1974, and later earned his Juris Doctor from the University of North Carolina School of Law (UNC) with honors.

After law school, Edwards clerked for federal judge Franklin Dupree in North Carolina, and in 1978 became an associate at the Nashville law firm of Dearborn & Ewing, doing primarily trial work, defending a Nashville bank and other corporate clients.

Lamar Alexander, a Republican and future governor of and U.S. Senator from Tennessee, was among Edwards's co-workers.

The Edwards family returned to North Carolina in 1981, settling in the capital of Raleigh, where he joined the firm of Tharrington, Smith & Hargrove.

In 1984, Edwards was assigned to a medical malpractice lawsuit that had been perceived to be unwinnable; the firm had accepted it only as a favor to an attorney and state senator who did not want to keep it.

Nevertheless, Edwards won a $3.7 million verdict on behalf of his client, who had suffered permanent brain and nerve damage after a doctor prescribed an overdose of the anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse during alcohol aversion therapy.

In other cases, Edwards sued the American Red Cross three times, alleging transmission of AIDS through tainted blood products, resulting in a confidential settlement each time, and defended a North Carolina newspaper against a libel charge.

In 1985, Edwards represented a five-year-old child born with cerebral palsy – a child whose mother's doctor did not choose to perform an immediate Caesarean delivery when a fetal monitor showed she was in distress.

Edwards won a $6.5 million verdict for his client, but five weeks later, the presiding judge sustained the verdict on liability but overturned the damage award on grounds that it was "excessive" and that it appeared "to have been given under the influence of passion and prejudice", adding that in his opinion "the evidence was insufficient to support the verdict."

He offered the plaintiffs $3.25 million, half of the jury's award, but the child's family appealed the case and received $4.25 million in a settlement.

Winning this case established the North Carolina precedent of physician and hospital liability for failing to determine whether the patient understood the risks of a particular procedure.

After this trial, Edwards gained national attention as a plaintiff's lawyer.

He filed at least twenty similar lawsuits in the years following, and achieved verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million for his clients.

Similar lawsuits followed across the country.

When asked about an increase in Caesarean deliveries nationwide, perhaps to avoid similar medical malpractice lawsuits, Edwards said, "The question is, would you rather have cases where that happens instead of having cases where you don't intervene and a child either becomes disabled for life or dies in utero?"

In 1993, Edwards began his own firm in Raleigh (now named Kirby & Holt) with a friend, David Kirby.

He became known as the top plaintiffs' attorney in North Carolina.

The biggest case of his legal career was a 1996 product liability lawsuit against Sta-Rite, the manufacturer of a defective pool drain cover.

The case involved Valerie Lakey, a girl who at five years old sustained pool suction-drain injury.

She was disemboweled by the suction power of the pool drain pump when she sat on an open pool drain whose protective cover had been removed by other children at the pool, after the swim club had failed to install the cover properly.

Despite 12 prior suits with similar claims, Sta-Rite continued to make and sell drain covers lacking warnings.

Edwards defeated incumbent Republican Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina's 1998 Senate election.

Following Kerry's loss to incumbent President George W. Bush, Edwards began working full-time at the One America Committee, a political action committee he established in 2001, and was appointed director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.

He was also a consultant for Fortress Investment Group LLC.

He was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004 alongside John Kerry, losing to incumbents George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

He also was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008.

Toward the end of his six-year term, he opted to retire from the Senate and focus on a Democratic campaign in the 2004 presidential election.

He eventually became the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president, the running mate of presidential nominee Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Following his 2008 presidential campaign, Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 3, 2011, on six felony charges of violating multiple federal campaign contribution laws to cover up an extramarital affair to which he eventually admitted.

He was found not guilty on one count, and the judge declared a mistrial on the remaining five charges, as the jury was unable to come to an agreement.

The Justice Department dropped the remaining charges and did not attempt to retry Edwards.

Though he was not convicted of any crime, the revelation that he had engaged in an extramarital affair and fathered a child while his wife, Elizabeth, was dying of cancer, gravely damaged his public image and essentially ended his political career.

Following this, he would return to law.