Groups line up to support CSX asbestos appeal
by admin on 26/01/10 at 8:31 am
The West Virginia Record
By John O’Brien
January 25, 2010
RICHMOND (Legal Newsline) — CSX Transportation’s appeal in a case alleging a Pittsburgh law firm conspired with a radiologist to fabricate an asbestos exposure claim is drawing attention from tort reform groups and asbestos expert witnesses.
Several organizations, including the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the American Tort Reform Foundation, are supporting the appeal of CSX. A federal judge granted Robert Peirce’s law firm on its motion for summary judgment two weeks before a September trial was to begin.
U.S. District Judge Frederick Stamp ruled that CSX missed the statute of limitations to bring the suit.
“The question before this Court is whether attorneys and doctors who exploit the unique circumstances of these mass proceedings to defraud the courts, opposing parties, and even indirectly plaintiffs with legitimate claims, can and will be held accountable for their misconduct in a manner that deters more of the same,” says the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s amicus brief, filed Monday.
“The district court’s rulings which that are the subject of this appeal place in doubt whether litigation fraud will in fact be deterred, given that the type of fraud in question often can be very difficult to detect, particularly for defendants confronted, through no fault of their own, with thousands of consolidated claims at a time and operating under severe discovery limitations and time constraints.
The Chamber argues that Stamp relied on “erroneous assumptions about the special procedures adopted for litigating asbestos personal injury claims” in the state when he dismissed CSX’s claims as time-barred.
Stamp should have further explored when CSX could have had access to plaintiff-specific information, the Chamber says.
Former Bridgeport radiologist Ray Harron was accused of diagnosing lung disease in patients who did not have it. CSX says Peirce, Raimond & Coulter then hid those plaintiffs with thousands of others, preventing it from being able to adequately investigate each complaint.
In 2005, federal court judge Janis Graham Jack made national headlines when she uncovered duplicate and fraudulent silica diagnoses in her Texas courtroom. Many of those diagnoses were made by Harron and were made on plaintiffs who had already brought asbestos claims.
In Jack’s opinion dismissing the claims, she said “These diagnoses were driven by neither health nor justice – they were manufactured for money.”
