Steve Stecklow, “Fraud by Trial Lawyers Taints Wave of Pesticide Lawsuits,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2009
“After responding to a radio commercial seeking former banana-plantation workers for a lawsuit against Dole Food Co., Marcos Sergio Medrano thought he might be entitled to some money,” begins this article exploring fraud allegations against lawyers and plaintiffs in banana-pesticide litigation. “He says an American law firm convinced him that a pesticide used on the Dole-operated banana plantation where he had worked years ago had made him sterile. Lawyers for the 49-year-old peasant produced tests that purported to prove it. But DNA testing by Dole revealed that he had fathered three children—something Mr. Medrano says was news to him.”
Stecklow writes that Medrano, of Chinandega, Nicaragua, is part of the “sorry fallout from a group of U.S. personal-injury and other lawyers who descended on this small, impoverished city, seeking to recruit thousands of clients and earn up to 40 percent of any awards. Emboldened by a developing-world legal system that heavily favored plaintiffs, they filed an avalanche of lawsuits here against California-based Dole and eventually won $2.1 billion in local judgments.”
But Stecklow reports that a California judge has ruled that plaintiffs and their lawyers deployed fraudulent tactics, which included faking sterility tests and using plaintiffs who never worked on banana plantations. “As a result ,” he writes, “actual workers who may have been hurt may receive nothing, even though Dole continued using a dangerous pesticide called DBCP after it had been linked definitively to male sterility.”
Stecklow chronicles the saga of litigation, ending by reporting that Dole still faces nearly 250 DBCP lawsuits, mostly in Nicaragua. He quotes an attorney who says he’s “not optimistic” plaintiffs will prevail because if fraud did occur “that would cause any reasonable person to question all the cases.”
