Legal News

Dole Confident About Pesticide Lawsuits; Honduras Prez in His Jammies

By Jennifer Forsyth

Over the weekend, the LA Times took a look at the fallout of a decision by California Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney in April that found that U.S. lawyers and their Nicaraguan partners had concocted cases against Dole Food Co. and chemical companies, which alleged that workers had been made sterile by the pesticide DBCP on Dole’s plantations in Central America and Africa. Chaney found that the lawyers recruited plaintiffs who never worked on banana plantations, trained them to lie on the witness stand and then waged a campaign of intimidation to prevent the scheme from being uncovered. (See here and here for previous LB coverage.)

The LAT says the ruling could now affect hundreds of similar claims by plaintiffs from Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Ivory Coast now pending in U.S. courts. Chaney’s ruling has already become a focal point in a federal case in Florida, where a judge is considering whether Dole and for other companies must pay $97 million awarded to 151 plaintiffs by a court in Nicaragua in 2005.

“Chaney’s ruling could lead to the end of the workers’ litigation against Dole entirely or, at a 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 story says.

Also be sure to check out the LAT’s story on the Constitutional crisis in Honduras that led to the coup that toppled President Manuel Zalaya. It’s the best blow by blow account LB has found, with great dollops of narrative including the following:

Up this this point the coup plotters might have been able to justify their actions to the international community by arguing the military was fulfilling a legitimate court order to arrest the president. What happened next, however, deprived them of that luxury. The military bundled Zelaya away to a military aircraft. Still in his pajamas, the president was flown to Costa Rica. Even among some who supported the removal of Zelaya, the decision to expel him went beyond the pale, and the army’s chief juridical advisory now acknowledges that the expulsion was illegal.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 13, 2009 (boomark / email).