JACKSON - The first significant tort reform legislation to make it to the Senate floor in a decade died Thursday without debate.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Bennie Turner, D-West Point, a trial lawyer, pocketed the bill, allowing the deadline to pass for legislation to come up for a vote in its chamber of origin.

The bill would have allowed either party in a case involving $5 million or more in damages to request that a jury pool include people from surrounding counties.

If brought up, the bill could have been amended to add measures that the business and health care lobby strongly wanted, including limits on liability and caps on damages.

"I think both sides are pretty much entrenched, and most legislators appreciate some spirit of compromise," Turner said after Thursday's adjournment. "That simply wasn't available to us in this instance."

Since 1995, Mississippi juries have awarded verdicts of more than $9 million to 20 victims, including seven awards of more than $100 million. Most of those awards, however, were significantly reduced on appeal or settled secretly for lesser amounts.

The heated debate has lasted months, with the business and health care lobby claiming that the state's legal climate is driving up insurance rates for doctors and costs to consumers, while driving away economic development.

Ron Aldridge, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said that as long as bills are routed through the lawyer-dominated judiciary committees, tort reform will be a tough fight.

"It will be extremely difficult to ever move any substantial tort reform that impacts personal injury trial lawyers' pocketbooks when the fox is guarding the hen house," he said.

Escatawpa native David Baria, president-elect of the state Trial Lawyers Association, said those advocating tort reform never provided any hard evidence that the civil justice system has pushed up insurance rates or hurt the state's business climate.

"It gives me comfort to know that a system of checks and balances is set up so that really bad stuff doesn't become law," Baria said. "I'm pleased the representatives and senators looked at facts, not hype."

Trial lawyers said a stagnant stock market caused insurance companies to try to recoup their losses by raising rates nationwide and pulling out of low-profit states such as Mississippi.

Vicksburg physician Randy Easterling, a Long Beach native and chairman of the Mississippi Medical Association's legislative issues committee, said doctors will be back seeking tort reform next year.

Mississippi has a "liability crisis," causing doctors to leave the state or stop performing difficult procedures, and older physicians to retire, he said.

"What I want to ask the senators who opposed this bill and Sen. Turner is, who's going to deliver babies in Sunflower, Attala and Bolivar counties?" said Easterling of counties that already have a dire shortage of obstetricians.