Legal News

Trial Starts in Libby, ?A Great Place to Grow Up; A Hell of a Place to Die?

By Ashby Jones

The long-awaited criminal trial involving W.R. Grace & Co. and its alleged actions in Libby, Mont. (pictured), kicked off on Monday in federal court in Missoula. Click here for the Bloomberg story; here for coverage from the Missoulian; here for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s take; here for a previous LB post.

In opening statements, federal prosecutor Kris McLean claimed the chemicals and construction materials company — which filed for bankruptcy in 2001 — harmed “hundreds if not thousands of people” by illegally releasing asbestos in and around its vermiculite mine in Libby, a small town in the northwest corner of the Big Sky state.

The company and five former executives are charged with conspiring to contaminate Libby, where Grace mined and processed vermiculite from 1963 to 1990, and obstructing government investigations. About 200 people in and around the town have died from asbestos exposure, and 1,200 were harmed, according to the government.

But there’s another side to this story, argued David Bernick, the Kirkland & Ellis lawyer handling the case for Grace. Bernick told jurors on Monday that the criminal charges are related to claims that Grace exposed Libby residents, not workers, to asbestos. He also told jurors that the government’s case had statute-of-limitations problems. (For anyone in the mass-tort world, Bernick needs no introduction — he handled a ton of tobacco litigation for the likes of Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson and served as Dow Corning’s lead trial counsel for its breast-implant litigation. (We also love the pose Bernick chose to strike in his Kirkland photo — as if he’s about to make a closing argument to the photographer.))

The Bloomberg story contains some nice color. The courtroom of U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy, who is overseeing the case, was remodeled to accommodate the more than two dozen lawyers and defendants. And outside the courtroom before the start of the trial, a 54-year-old former Grace worker and activist was setting up a chair and card table. His goal: to stop people from moving into Libby until the town is cleaned up.

“Libby’s a great place to grow up,” he said. “But it’s a hell of a place to die.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 24, 2009 (boomark / email).