"Once you see fire, you look closer to see if there's smoke in other cases like this one," said Stephen Yeazell, a UCLA law professor who specializes in international civil litigation.
DBCP, or dibromochloropropane, was used on banana farms in the developing world until at least 1979, two years after it was linked to sperm damage in factory workers who produced 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.
Litigation over DBCP has become something of an international industry in recent years, with U.S. lawyers competing for clients abroad with the goal of getting U.S. courts to try their cases or enforce foreign judgments.
The claims of the farmworkers had been portrayed sympathetically in the media, including in a documentary film -- premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival last month -- that told the story from the point of view of plaintiffs in Nicaragua. Last week, attorneys for Dole sued the Swedish filmmaker behind the documentary for slander and libel, arguing that Chaney's ruling proved it was inaccurate and defamatory.
Chaney's ruling could lead to the end of the workers' litigation against Dole entirely or, at minimum, severely cloud plaintiffs' cases. The cases in Los Angeles Superior Court, spearheaded by Juan Dominguez, a personal-injury lawyer best known for his ads on Los Angeles buses, consumed months of court time and millions of dollars. Dominguez is now being investigated by the California state bar, under an order from Chaney.
The scam, Chaney wrote, was part of a much wider fraud in Nicaragua -- a thriving industry of manufacturing plaintiffs to capitalize on a justice system rigged against multinational corporations.
At the center of that system, she wrote, is a law passed by the Nicaraguan government in 2001 that ordered the courts to fast-track DBCP claims.
Anybody claiming to have been exposed to the chemical on a banana farm who can produce a lab report showing he is sterile is entitled to damages. Evidence presentation is limited to eight days, after which the court has three days to decide the case. Defendants, such as Dole, must deposit millions of dollars in a trust for the right to defend themselves. They generally don't bother because it is almost impossible for them to win.
As the Florida case is set to restart, attorneys for Dole have already submitted Chaney's ruling to bolster their argument that the $97-million judgment in Nicaragua was a sham.
