New trial ordered in DuPont litigation
by admin on 29/03/10 at 6:11 am
The Exponent Telegram
By Matt Harvey
March 28, 2010
CLARKSBURG — The jurors who in 2007 awarded a nearly $400 million verdict against DuPont in a Harrison County pollution/medical monitoring case didn’t have the last word after all.
The state Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling that sets the stage for one of the highest-stakes showdowns ever to be held in a civil court case in Harrison County.
A new jury will be asked to decide a simple but pivotal question: Whether the statute of limitations had expired before the original lawsuit against DuPont was filed in 2004.
If the new jurors find that the lawsuit wasn’t filed in time, then DuPont wins and the entire class action award is erased. If the jurors decide the lawsuit was filed in time, then the nearly $130 million set aside for medical monitoring stands, as does the almost $55 million for remediation.
The justices also decided that the punitive damage award of about $196 million was too much, trimming it 40 percent because medical monitoring can’t be used in the calculating of such damages.
The opinion written by Barbour/Taylor Circuit Judge Alan D. Moats, sitting by special assignment because of a justice’s disqualification from the case, also subtracted $20 million from the punitive award for cleanup work already done by DuPont.
The new punitive award would be about $98 million, although the opinion authored by Moats gives the plaintiffs 30 days to decide if that’s enough. If not, they can opt for a new trial to be held, but only on punitive damages.
An area legal insider who wanted to remain anonymous predicted the new trial on the statute-of-limitations issue would only take a couple weeks at most, and the new trial date could be selected as early as next week.
But that will be up to Harrison Circuit Judge Thomas A. Bedell, who presided over the original proceedings that generated thousands of pages and took almost half a decade to conclude.
Literally hundreds of legal professionals were involved in the case, most from around the country.
