The plaintiffs' attorneys countered that Chaney's ruling is full of inaccuracies and overly broad.
"It's amazing to me that a judge can criticize in a sweeping way an entire country's integrity and make a ruling on every individual's honesty and integrity, even those who aren't before her," said plaintiffs' attorney Steven Marks of the Miami-based firm Podhurst Orseck.
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.
Chaney's ruling implicates Provost and Umphrey, a Texas law firm representing plaintiffs in the Florida case along with Podhurst Orseck, in the alleged fraud in Nicaragua. Chaney wrote that one of its attorneys, Mark Sparks, was present in a 2003 meeting in Nicaragua at which lawyers, medical laboratory officials and a judge set out a plan to manufacture evidence and bolster cases in the Nicaraguan courts.
In court filings, Sparks and his firm denied he ever attended such a meeting, and argued that Chaney's ruling was fundamentally unfair because it did not offer them the right to defend themselves.
The ruling was based primarily on information from witnesses whose names and unredacted testimony to Dole lawyers remain sealed under an order by Chaney, who became convinced that their lives would be in danger if their identities were made public.
In any case, the plaintiffs' lawyers in the Florida case said they had no involvement in the California cases.
Sparks and his firm released a statement saying they "are confident that our investigation, testing and diagnosis protocols were superior to other firms in this litigation."
The battle over DBCP is part of a murky debate in international law about how justice should be administered when a company is accused of wrongdoing on foreign soil.
International law prefers that cases be tried where they happen. But many courts in the Third World are ill-equipped to handle complex cases, have little authority to enforce judgments and often do not afford attorneys the powers they would have in U.S. courts to gather evidence.
"There are alleged international, global wrongful acts, but we don't have a proper forum, and it's ping-pong between countries, between the courts of developing and developed countries," said Alejandro Garro, a Columbia University law professor who has testified on behalf of banana workers.
Before the Nicaraguan fast-track law went into effect, multinational defendants were generally able to keep their cases out of U.S. courts and stalled in the Nicaraguan system.
