The unraveling of multimillion-dollar Los Angeles cases alleging that Nicaraguan men had been sterilized by pesticide exposure is now threatening to upend hundreds of other claims in U.S. courts, as judges examine charges that plaintiffs' lawyers orchestrated an extraordinary international fraud.
At the center of the claims is the pesticide DBCP and allegations that workers in banana plantations in Central America and Africa were harmed by exposure to the chemical.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, July 19, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 3 inches; 119 words Type of Material: Correction
Pesticide cases: A July 12 article in Section A described the unraveling of lawsuits brought against U.S. corporations by Nicaraguan men alleging chemical exposure left them sterile. The article said that a ruling by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge finding fraud in the cases was having an effect on suits pending elsewhere in the country, including some in Florida. The article said the judge's ruling "implicates Provost and Umphrey, a Texas law firm representing plaintiffs in the Florida case along with Podhurst Orseck, in the alleged fraud." Podhurst Orseck, a firm based in Miami, is representing plaintiffs in Florida along with the Texas firm. The judge's ruling did not implicate Podhurst Orseck along with Provost and Umphrey.
In November 2007, a Los Angeles jury awarded $5.7 million to six Nicaraguan men who sued Dole Food Co. and chemical companies, alleging they had been made sterile by DBCP on Dole's plantations. The amount was later reduced by a judge and is now on appeal. The case will probably be thrown out entirely in the wake of a judge's findings of fraud in two related cases.
Those cases against Dole, Dow Chemical Co. and AMVAC Chemical Corp. were set to go to trial this year. Then, in April, Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney dismissed the claims, ruling that U.S. lawyers and their Nicaraguan partners had concocted the cases through an audacious fraud, recruiting plaintiffs who had never worked on banana plantations, training them to lie on the witness stand and then waging a campaign of intimidation to prevent the scheme from being uncovered.
Chaney's ruling could now affect hundreds of similar claims by plaintiffs from Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Ivory Coast that are pending in U.S. courts, legal experts said.
The judge's ruling has already become a focal point in a federal court in Florida, where a judge is considering whether Dole and four other multinational fruit and chemical firms should pay $97 million awarded to 151 plaintiffs by a court in Nicaragua in 2005. Those cases have been on hold since early this year, when the Florida judge decided to await the outcome here before taking further action.
Nicaraguan courts have awarded more than $2 billion to thousands of peasants with DBCP claims since 2001 -- but with no means to help them collect. The plaintiffs turned to the federal court in Florida to try to enforce the Nicaraguan judgment. If they prevail, it is likely that other winners in the Nicaraguan system will attempt to collect judgments in U.S. courts.
In addition to its effect on those cases, the Los Angeles ruling will probably dissuade other plaintiffs' attorneys and make other U.S. judges more skeptical about DBCP claims brought before their courts, experts said.
