A mass tort is a civil action involving numerous plaintiffs against one or a few corporate defendants. The tort may involve, for example, personal injuries suffered by numerous plaintiffs as a result of a defective product, or a mass disaster in which there were many injured persons, such as an airplane crash, or exposure of a large group of people to toxic chemicals or pharmaceuticals.
Parchman is a small unincorporated town in Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States, in the Mississippi Delta region. Best known as the home of Mississippi State Penitentiary, formerly called Parchman Farm, Parchman is the oldest prison and the only maximum security prison in the state. Parchman also houses inmates who have been sentenced to death in Mississippi on death row. Instead of building a permanent execution chamber there, the state built the first portable electric chair in the United States, carried on a pickup truck and used until 1955, for executions at Parchman.