ThePopTort

The Two Faces of Asbestos Transparency

Just catching up today on our earlier post about the series of hearings held this week by various subcommittees of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.  So let’s discuss Wednesday.

In the morning, the Center for Justice & Democracy participated in a hearing on the topic of “litigation abuses,” which CJ&D defined this way:  

As a result of hundreds if not thousands of so-called “tort reform” laws that have passed around the country in the last 30 years, a series of recent Supreme Court decisions that have stripped everyday people of their legal rights (including providing corporations with the ability to ban all class actions) and other action and inaction by Congress, the sick, injured and violated struggle even to get into civil court today. 

Actually, this leads right to the Wednesday afternoon hearing on asbestos poisoning. Talk about the struggles of the sick and injured!  But let’s begin with secrecy, shall we?  Since without that, hundreds of thousands of people would not have died from asbestos exposure, and millions more would not face illness or death from asbestos disease, and the lethal cancer known as mesothelioma.

Since at least the 1930s, asbestos manufacturers and their insurers deliberately hid the dangers of asbestos from their own workers and the public.  For example, in 1933, the Johns-Manville Company settled with an attorney for 11 former Manville employees, all asbestosis victims.  The attorney received $30,000 for the victims, in exchange for a written promise that he would not “directly or indirectly participate in the bringing of new actions against the Corporation.”  This fact did not come to light for more than 45 years.  In the meantime, the company was able successfully to avoid damages suits while continuing to poison people.  Had the public known about this settlement, the hazards of asbestos would have come to light decades earlier.  (Learn more by reading this incredible book by Paul Brodeur.)

In other word, lives would have been saved and lawsuits prevented if Big Asbestos had been even the slightest bit transparent about the dangers almost a century ago. 

After killing and sickening all these people, the asbestos industry then used special bankruptcy laws to get rid of all of their asbestos liability through the creation of trusts.  These trusts, set up to compensate victims, have always been underfunded.  As a result, most asbestos victims are grossly undercompensated. 

Usually, multiple asbestos products and companies are responsible for each persons’ exposure.  State laws ensure that every defendant, whether a traditional defendant or a trust, only pays its share of liability.  At Wednesday’s hearing, Caplin & Drysdale attorney Elihu Inselbuch, who has 25 years experience representing victims’ rights in asbestos bankruptcy proceedings, explained:

Think of the shipyard worker, for example, assisting in the repair of countless U.S. Navy warships. The asbestos - containing products which were causes of his injury included boilers, pipe and thermal insulation, gaskets, and many others. A person so injured can legally recover from every company responsible, including both those he sues in the tort system and the trusts that stand in the shoes of bankrupt defendants. The current efforts by ALEC and its members are nothing more than an attempt to shift solvent defendants’ share of responsibility to the insolvent defendants and leave the innocent victims with the resulting shortfall in recovery.

According to a major General Accountability Office study in 2011, the trusts are doing a great job carefully examining evidence of claims before making payments while also preventing any possible fraud. GAO wrote:

According to the officials we interviewed at all 11 trusts we selected, each trust is committed to ensuring that no fraudulent claims are paid by the trust, which aligns with their goals of preserving assets for future claimants. Although the possibility exists that a claimant could file the same medical evidence and altered work histories with different trusts, each trust’s focus is to ensure that each claim meets the criteria defined in its TDP, meaning the claimant has met the requisite medical and exposure histories to the satisfaction of the trustees. Of the trust officials that we interviewed that conducted audits, none indicated that these audits had identified cases of fraud.

Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal has its own “interpretation” of this statement, publishing some articles lately that instead rely on unnamed, unidentified “politicians, judges and defense lawyers” who claim that the “opportunity for abuse flourishes,” and then unfairly tying this politically-based perspective to anomalies likely paperwork or “keystroke” errors (which are themselves pretty rare, especially for such a vast system). 

But all this is apparently to provide support for federal legislation called the FACT Act, on which there were hearings Wednesday afternoon – a topic about which we’ve written before.  Testified asbestos bankruptcy expert Elihu Inselbuch,

Asbestos defendants and insurance companies, under the guise of creating increased  “transparency,” are introducing proposed legislation in state legislatures [and now Congress] to grant solvent asbestos  defendants new rights and advantages to be used against asbestos victims in court. Some of these bills would also burden the asbestos trusts with unnecessary reporting requirements, slowing their ability to pay claims, and further draining them of the resources needed to make their already diminished payments. In general, the  bills are an attempt to change the rules of the tort  system to provide defendants with an advantage, using the existence of the trusts and claims of a  lack of “transparency” as a subterfuge. …  

It is also important to note that the bill only changes what the trust must report with respect to an  asbestos victim; the bill says nothing of the right of asbestos defendants to demand confidentiality. A typical asbestos defendant who settles a case in the tort system demands confidentiality as a condition of settlement in order to ensure that other victims do not learn how much the defendant paid. Trust payments represent settlements of former a asbestos defendants.  The remaining asbestos defendants now want the trusts to disclose specific settlement amounts and other information that they themselves  do not  provide and that the bankrupt  asbestos defendants who created the trusts  did not provide when they  were  defendants in the tort system .  … 

Here is his conclusion:

Under the rubric of arguing that “transparency” is necessary to prevent supposed fraud, asbestos companies continue their efforts to change the laws at a state and federal level to receive whatever benefits they can from the existence of the trusts.  These laws that seek to enforce disclosure, regulate timing of trust claims, and put additional burdens on these trusts, such as  the  FACT Act, are unjust and unfair to asbestos victims.

These laws were never designed  — nor  intended  — to address fraud in the trust system. Indeed, there is not a scintilla of evidence of any such problem. The real purpose of these laws is to allow solvent defendants to take advantage of the bankruptcies of their co - tortfeasors by shifting to plaintiffs the burdens of the shortfalls caused by the bankruptcies, as well as the burdens of discovery and proof of the bankrupt  tortfeasors’ responsibility. These laws are simply the latest stratagem by corporations that  produced and distributed asbestos - containing products to avoid responsibility for the deaths and  injuries of millions of Americans caused by those products.

Legislators should not allow public policy to be hijacked by special interests, and should be vigilant to protect the rights of injured  workers and their families.

ALEC’s Phony Crony Capitalism

The American Legislative Exchange Council is the secretive organization of conservative lawmakers and corporations that draft and shop around model bills without identifying that these bills are written by national corporate lobbyists. It’s been called many things lately.  Let’s see.  Union buster.  Voter suppresser.  Concealed weapon and shoot to kill champ. Mistreater of asbestos victims.  Abuser of its charitable status.  

We also like Paul Krugman’s descriptive paragraph:

…ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism. 

That more or less fits ALEC’s civil justice agenda too.  It’s new priorities are listed in a brand new report called ALEC 2013: Jobs, Innovation, and Opportunity in the States, and when it comes to people harmed or killed by corporate wrongdoing, it focuses on three areas: making it more difficult for people injured or killed by unsafe or defective products to hold manufacturers accountable in court; limiting the availability of “class actions,” so that big companies can more successfully violate large numbers of people with impunity; and limiting lawsuits by people who have been defrauded under state consumer protection laws.  All such laws transfer the costs of injuries away from those who caused them and onto others (like taxpayers, when people are severely hurt and need care.)

In other words, ALEC would like to undermine the tort system’s economic function -  deterrence of non cost-justified accidents - replacing it with new rules constraining what is now a free-market approach to holding corporations accountable for their negligence.  (You can read more about the tort system's important economic function in the 1987 book, The Economic Structure of Tort Law by conservative economic theorists William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner.)

So let's add one more ALEC description - subverter of the free market tort system.

Ohio’s Transparently Anti-Victim Asbestos Bill

It was what, maybe 6 months ago, that we posted a story about a federal asbestos bill, the proponents of which publicly argued was “needed” for “transparency,” but what they meant was really this:

OK, we’ve gone out of business and set up underfunded trusts (per bankruptcy laws) to pay compensation to the sick and dying, but the process is just too quick and easy! And that’s especially true for dying mesothelioma patients! So we need to make the process even more onerous by demanding that these trusts greatly increase their unnecessary paperwork, requiring a whole lot of new pointless personal information about victims –meanwhile victims die waiting for what’s owed them.

What we didn’t mention in our post was that this wasn’t just any asbestos bill. This one came Straight Outta ALEC (apologies to N.W.A.) although you’d never know that from the general media coverage of this issue.  ALEC (you may know), or the American Legislative Exchange Council, is the influential, secretive organization that writes state bills to promote the agenda of corporate America. The bill is part of the agenda of ALEC’s very active Civil Justice Task Force, co-chaired by Victor Schwartz, General Counsel for the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), a corporate group seeking to limit the liability of its corporate members. The legislation generated by this Task Force provides huge legal advantages for our nation’s most negligent and callous companies, many of which have been successfully sued over and over for recklessly causing death and injury to their customers.  (See also, CJ&D’s report, America’s Worst Top Model as well as CJ&D’s Spotlight on Justice on the sordid past of the asbestos industry.) 

While the federal bill ultimately went nowhere in Congress, states influenced by ALEC have been a different story altogether. Yesterday in Ohio, four state senate Republicans joined all 10 Democrats in trying to block this very same bill at the state level, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the legislation, which now moves to Gov. John Kasich’s desk. One of the bill’s major proponents was Sen. Bill Seitz (R-Cincinnati), who co-chairs ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force with Victor Schwartz.  So there’s that, too.

Writes the Ohio’s Toledo Blade,

Critics of the bill … accused majority Republicans of throwing up more obstacles to asbestos victims, a decade after passing a law that made it tougher for those exposed to the substance to sue.  About 90 percent of some 40,000 asbestos cases pending in Ohio courts at the time were dismissed because the plaintiffs could not demonstrate substantial impairment of their health beyond simple changes in a chest X-ray.

“This legislation is again another example of the 129th General Assembly’s war on Ohio workers,” said Sen. Mike Skindell (D., Lakewood). “It is a piece of legislation brought to us in part by the corporate-influenced American Legislative Exchange Council, otherwise known as ALEC.…

Most manufacturers of products containing asbestos, including Toledo-based Owens Corning, long ago went through federal bankruptcy proceedings that resulted in the creation of more than 60 trusts against which asbestos victims could make claims. This bill is primarily focused on aiding other companies like Perrysburg-based Owens-Illinois that did not go through bankruptcy and are still fighting asbestos-related lawsuits more than 40 years after the fibrous substance was pulled from the market.

The Asbestos Victims Coalition is asking people to call Governor Kasich today. It’s urgent.  Here’s their statement. Once again, it all comes down to Ohio.

A Transparent Attack on Asbestos Victims

One of our favorite (long-form) quotes comes from Dr. David Ozonoff, a toxicologist at Boston University.  CJ&D cited him in a report about the environment but he’s talking specifically about asbestos – i.e., how the asbestos industry, for decades, kept coming up with new lies about this poison, all for the purpose of denying compensation to millions of diseased workers and their families.  Here’s how the historical denial goes:

Asbestos doesn’t hurt your health.

OK, it does hurt your health, but it doesn’t cause cancer.

OK, asbestos can cause cancer, but not our kind of asbestos.

OK, our kind of asbestos can cause cancer, but not the kind this person got.

OK, our kind of asbestos can cause cancer, but not at the doses to which this person was exposed.

OK, asbestos does cause cancer, and at this dosage, but this person got his disease from something else – like smoking.

OK, he was exposed to our asbestos and it did cause his cancer, but we did not know about the danger when we exposed him.

OK, we knew about the danger when we exposed him, but the statute of limitations has run out.

OK, the statute of limitations hasn’t run out, but if we’re guilty we’ll go out of business and everyone will be worse off.

OK, we’ll agree to go out of business, but only if you let us keep part of our company intact, and only if you limit our liability for the harms we have caused.

Well turns out that tomorrow, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee is continuing its tradition this Congress of wasting time on solutions in need of a problem by marking H.R. 4369 – a bill that would hand the asbestos industry a brand new denial technique.  It goes something like this:

OK, we’ve gone out of business and set up underfunded trusts (per bankruptcy laws) to pay compensation to the sick and dying, but the process is just too quick and easy!  And that’s especially true for dying mesothelioma patients!  So we need to make the process even more onerous by demanding that these trusts greatly increase their unnecessary paperwork, requiring a whole lot of new pointless personal information about victims –meanwhile victims die waiting for what’s owed them. 

For more, see the Center for Justice & Democracy’s letter to the Committee, as well as testimony presented by attorney Charles Siegel at the firm Waters Kraus Paul.

The proponents of this legislation say it’s about transparency – too much information about these claims is covered-up even though trusts already disclose much information.  Yet that seems like an awfully suspicious reason to me.  As CJ&D points out in its letter,

[T]he legislation does nothing to prevent defendants in tort suits from continuing to demand confidentiality from victims on their terms, a practice in which they have engaged for as long as they have been settling cases.  Transparency is clearly not the goal of this legislation.  It is about delaying claims payments for as long as possible.

I’d say the reasons behind this bill couldn’t be any more transparent.

Cooked-Up Lawsuits and the Agenda Behind Them

If you’ve seen the documentary film, Hot Coffee, you may recall the great soundbite from our very good buddy Victor Schwartz, General Counsel for the American Tort Reform Association, who talks about how false descriptions of lawsuits – or even completely made up ones – are pushed out there by his other buddies.  Not intentionally.  Ahem, cough, cough.  In fact, pushing out false descriptions of lawsuits intended to outrage the reader or listener have been the cornerstone of the “tort reform” movement for years.  In Hot Coffee, you’ll see U.S. presidents as far back as Ronald Regan engaging in this behavior.

It’s not like these PR stunts are any big secret.  Even if you haven’t seen Hot Coffee (HBO Signature is showing it again this month – check your listings!), we know that Snopes.com, a website that debunks urban legends, found that a list of six crazy “real lawsuits” circulating around the Internet since May 2001 was entirely made up, once causing media critic Howard Kurtz to come down hard on U.S. News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman for repeating them.  See also Stephanie Mencimer’s article, “False Alarm; How the media helps the insurance industry and the GOP promote the myth of America's ‘lawsuit crisis,’” or professors Haltom and McCann’s book Distorting the Law; Politics, Media and the Litigation Crisis, which we talked about here.

Yet it is honestly still surprising to me when members of the media decide not to become the “tort reform” movement’s unwitting agents by promoting misleading, exaggerated or completely wrong descriptions of lawsuits.  So here’s a shout out to Fayetteville, North Carolina reporter Gene Smith, in his blog “Y’Think?”, who bucked the trend with a brutally honest critique of a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform “Top 10 Crazy Lawsuits” BS list.  To wit:

[T[here’s no mention of the disposition of those cases, although the chamber did provide a link to the stories on which its Top Ten were based, and that made further research possible.… I count five dismissals (so far), and predict the same fate for the other plaintiffs.

Some filed their own actions. Why does that matter -- expense? Nah. It doesn’t cost that much to file something. Most who filed their own stuff probably did so because no lawyer would risk his reputation placing that kind of crap before a judge.

More important is that I found no evidence that any of the chamber’s Top Ten meritless cases has cost businesses (Oh: and, of course, pee-pul) anything more than a modest fee to answer the complaint and prepare to finesse it in a single motion if it comes to court. There’s not a bankruptcy on the list -- not even an itty-bitty fine.

And this matters … why?

Because (A) The Top Ten were posted by the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, a title that implies a need for a fix, and (B) the Institute’s annual roll call “helps to remind us that abusive lawsuits affect real people and real businesses, and can have harmful results to lives, jobs, and even our economic growth."

Please specify the harm to lives, jobs and economic growth caused by the 10 cases the chamber found representative of what it would have you believe is the norm or, at least, commonplace.

In North Carolina, you’re too late. We’ve already “reformed” because it’s hard not to become an instant convert (see above) if you stop thinking too soon. In addition to the “contributory negligence” doctrine that keeps you from recouping your full losses from an auto accident, our state now sports a new limit on liability if you’re wronged by a surgeon or some other provider of a product or service. (Nationally, we do the same for oil spills and nuclear mishaps.)

Feeling more secure yet? Enjoy the yuks. You’re the one who'll be paying the bill.

Ironically, this comes just as this year’s poster-child case for dreadfully-irresponsible reporting of jury verdicts was actually dismissed altogether, a case covered in the Center for Justice & Democracy’s report, Headline Blues, on which we reported here.  As noted in the report, while every headline about this case at the time  mentioned the eye-popping $322 million asbestos verdict, rarely was there any mention in the stories "the fact that state law automatically and severely caps both non-economic and punitive damages in Mississippi.  The highest any punitive damages award can be in Mississippi -for companies worth more than $1 billion - is $20 million.  And non-economic damages are capped at $1 million.”

People deserve to know the truth, right?  They sure don’t deserve to be played by PR campaigns and lobbying agendas.  At least Mr. Smith figured it out.

"Tort Reform" That Even the Texas Supreme Court Can’t Stomach

The Texas Supreme Court has been called a lot of things.  Pro-business, certainly.  Anti-consumer.  Certainly anti-worker, particularly in light of its highly controversial decision Entergy vs. Summers.  (See our earlier coverage here.) That decision “allows plant owners to obtain immunity from injured workers' suits for damages by providing workers' compensation insurance coverage for subcontractors' employees working on their premises.”  

Or in the words of Becky Moeller, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, with this decision, “The Texas Supreme Court has gouged a giant hole in the legal protections for Texas workers by giving large-business owners a technical loophole to escape the consequences of their own wrongdoing.”   And its not like the law required that they do this.  As State Senator Kirk Watson said, “The Court reached a result that the Legislature has rejected over and over again.”

(See here, here for more explanation, especially how this decision benefits corporate lawbreakers like BP.) 

So you know that striking down so-called “tort reforms” isn’t normally on this court's “to do” list.  More likely its on the “not to do” list -- except apparently, sometimes the greed of these lobby groups has been so extreme that even the Texas Supreme Court can’t stomach it.

With a headline reading “Justices reject tort reform provision,” the Houston Chronicle reported over the weekend that a small part of the brutal 2003 Texas “tort reform” law was struck down by the Texas Supreme Court because its retroactivity provision was “designed to protect one company from a lawsuit brought by a man dying of asbestos exposure,” specifically Crown Cork & Seal Inc. of Pennsylvania.

Apparently, this company has “pushed similar legislation to limit asbestos lawsuits in other states through the national American Legislative Exchange Council” and that “Crown had obtained similar retroactive laws in 10 other states. Pennsylvania courts already have ruled the law unconstitutional there.”

"It shouldn't surprise anybody that a part of [Texas “tort reform"] House Bill 4 is unconstitutional," said George "Tex" Quesada, an attorney at Sommerman & Quesada in Dallas who represents plaintiffs in a variety of cases. "It's taken the court far too long to get started on this."

In The Republic, Plato (pictured above) called avarice “a disgrace.”  Maybe for some, it takes 2300 years to sink in.  But we'll take it where we can get it!

New York Coverups That Only Tony Soprano Could Love – Lead, Asbestos, and Medical Malpractice

Remember that story line in The Sopranos, where Carmella's spec house was built with substandard materials, the building inspector wouldn’t OK it and finally Tony had Sil lean on the building inspector?  OK well there are a couple story lines in New York City today that make this Sopranos episode look like a safety video.

First, lead story in the New York Times today is an incredible tale of 68-year-old Saverio F. Todaro, who was “licensed to make critical assessments of asbestos and lead risks in buildings and at construction sites across the city,” and who has now pleaded guilty to submitting “clean asbestos or lead test results for well over 200 buildings and apartments,” having never conducted a single test.  According to the Times, “the number of potential victims of Mr. Todaro’s fraud, which spanned at least a decade, loomed so large that the Manhattan United States attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case, created a separate Web page to comply with a law requiring it to notify victims.”  Moreover, “his admissions late last month have raised troubling questions about whether such conduct might be more widespread.”

The health and safety implications of this – and the liability exposure of the city, which failed to oversee and catch this misconduct – are extremely serious.  Lead poisoning causes irreversible brain damage in children and has been a huge problem in this city.  (See CJ&D’s booklet How The Civil justice System Protects Environmental Health for a discussion of the importance of civil cases in this area.)  In fact, this whole situation came to light over tests supposedly done in a Queens apartment where a child “showed high levels of lead in his blood two years in a row.”  Asbestos poisoning is lethal and one of the biggest public health disasters of our time because of systemic cover-ups by industry.

The second big apparent continuing cover-up involves malpractice at New York hospitals. According to the New York Daily News (we'll add the link when it comes online but here's their earlier coverage), “New York hospitals have reported sharply dropping numbers of mishaps, a new study says - causing probers to wonder whether the medical centers are holding back.” 

The paper reports, "By law, all hospitals must report serious 'adverse incidents' to the state through a computerized system called NYPORTS - New York Patient Occurrence Reporting and Tracking System." Reported adverse incidents suspiciously fell "from 30,416 in 2002 to 12,091 in 2007," and “the trend shows continuing problems with underreporting mistakes.”

The problem was particularly acute in New York City hospitals, which reported the lowest level of reported incidents. They reported 350 per 100,000 patients in 2007 - the last year tallied - compared with 428 statewide.

"That's something you have to look at," [Art Levin of the Center for Medical Consumers] said. "I do not believe the city hospitals by definition keep their patients safer than hospitals upstate.

"I think you have to ask, 'What is going on in New York City?' "

There are a lot of things we could say at this point.  I think we’ll just leave it there!

Whistles, Pipes and Modern Day Robber Barons

Bob Herbert has a New York Times column today about the sorry state of this country’s infrastructure, a problem that hopefully the President is more willing to tackle especially because of the jobs it could generate.  Herbert tells an interesting story about the pipes under Philadelphia, when (according to then Mayor Ed Rendell), “58 of our water mains broke, causing all sorts of havoc … The pipes were old. Some were ancient ... and they were laid shallow, without much protection.  So with any radical changes in temperature, they were susceptible to breaking.  We had a real emergency on our hands.”

In fact, some of those pipes were laid back in the 19^th century - robber barons days.  So it's kind of incredible that they lasted so long.  I guess even the greedy industrialists back in the day didn’t have the gall to do what apparently the company JM Eagle has been doing to cites and water districts since 1996.  According to the company’s former employee, John Hendrix, the company has been:

falsifying test results about the quality of its products. Pipes that should last 50 years are in some cases rupturing in their very first year, according to Mr. Hendrix and some state documents. This can lead to explosions, leaks, fires and other dangers.

[Hendrix said] JM Eagle had been selling substandard plastic pipe since 1996, and that it had subsequently manipulated test results. “It became apparent to me that this was being done intentionally,” he said in an interview [with the New York Times].

Nevada, Virginia, Delaware, Tennessee and more than 40 water authorities in California have brought suit, saying this could cost each of them many millions of dollars to fix.  And that’s just the beginning. The company claims “about 60 percent of the nation’s market for new water pipes.”

And for all of you asbestos trivia fans out there, turns out that JM Eagle is a successor to Johns Manville, which went bankrupt in the early 1980s after poisoning countless people with asbestos for decades knowing the medical dangers, covering this up for 45 years. 

Let’s hope this whole mess at least creates some jobs.

NIH Official Moonlighting for Asbestos Defense, Pleads Guilty to Lying

“The first thing one learns when representing mesothelioma victims, is that the success of those who profited from asbestos rises and falls on its ability to hide the truth,” said Troy D. Chandler, an attorney at Williams Kherkher.  And he should know.  A couple of years ago, Chandler took on the case of Samuel Allardyce, who contracted mesothelioma after a “lifelong exposure” to asbestos in his job as a welder.  That’s when the “hiding” began.

Enter Dr. Jack W. Snyder, a physician and licensed attorney who was working full time as a senior official at the National Institute of Health (NIH), while moonlighting as a $425 per hour “expert witness” in a variety of criminal and civil cases across the country, with a special penchant for defending asbestos manufacturers.

When Snyder began working for the NIH, he was specifically instructed by an ethics employee to knock off the outside work.  But Snyder secretly flouted this directive for years—that is, until he finally got tripped up during a 2007 deposition with Troy Chandler.

According to Chandler, Snyder told a series of “blatant lies” during his sworn testimony—some of which were aimed at downplaying his role at the NIH and the magnitude of his conflicts of interest, and others which were factually “in direct conflict with the official position of a number of government agencies.” Snyder’s biggest whopper: “[E]ven in the most extreme cases of exposure to asbestos…available medical and scientific literature would not support a causal connection to cancer.”

Long story short, Chandler was so incensed at the magnitude of Snyder’s lying, that he sent letters to his NIH boss, as well as the Office of Inspector General, calling for “an immediate investigation into Dr. Snyder's side work as a consultant.”  Chandler’s letter also caught the attention of the U.S. Attorney’s office, an investigation was launched, and Snyder was eventually convicted of making false statements on financial disclosure forms to the NIH (related to his outside work).

But for Chandler, whose client, Samuel Allardyce, has since died, that comes as cold comfort.  “In the end, [Snyder] was only convicted of lying.  It reminds me of how the government got Al Capone, not for murder, but for lying on his tax returns.”  Still, said Chandler, “at least this doctor’s lying career is over.”

Chemicals, Drugs, Unsafe Cars, Lead Paint, Tobacco, Asbestos Ads - Need We Go On?

We loved this great blog item from The Consumerist called “Top 10 Ironic Ads From History” and just about all of them have an ironic civil justice angle too.  And some aren’t so “historical”.   (But they are somewhat hysterical.) 

Take, for example, the ad for the Bhopal India chemical plant, which ended up causing the worst industrial accident in the world.  Had civil lawsuits against Union Carbide been allowed to proceed in U.S. courts, hundreds of thousands of injured people would have received a lot better justice.

Or one for the Corvair, a very dangerous GM car.  What, GM sometimes puts unsafe cars on the road?   No way.  Way.

Or the Big Asbestos cover up.

Or the drug Thalidomide.  The FDA never approved Thalidomide but it did approve Accutane, which led to similar birth defects.  That drug was JUST taken off the market.

Or Dupont - not our favorite company.  See here and here for some examples why.

Or lead paint.  How about lead paint on toys?  How about today?  

Or drug companies pushing heroin.  OK, maybe not heroin today.  But how about other unsafe drugs?

Or the Ford Pinto.  Only because of litigation was this dangerous car taken off the market.

Or tobacco.  And in particular, Big Tobacco’s role in limiting the legal rights of injured consumers

Gotta laugh, right?