Dole on a Roll: Court Declines to Enforce $97M Judgment

[WSJ_law_blog]

If there’s one piece of litigation bouncing around out there that seems to have it all — it just might be the litigation involving Dole Food and Central American workers. The case involves just about everything an onlooker would want: allegations of corporate malfeasance, allegations of lawyer fraud, fascinating international-law issues and big money at stake. Someday, they’re going to make a movie about the case. (Oh wait, they already have).

In any event, a big development in the case erupted on Tuesday when a federal judge in Miami said that Dole can’t be forced in the U.S. to pay a $97-million judgment ordered by a Nicaraguan court. Click here and here for stories from the LA Times and Bloomberg, respectively. Click here, here, here and here and here for previous LB coverage of the Dole situation; here for a very nice front-page story from the WSJ’s Steve Stecklow on the case from August.

The award, won four years ago by 150 Nicaraguans who said they suffered injuries from pesticides used at Dole’s banana farms in the 1970s, can’t be enforced because it was based on a law that violates international legal standards, said Judge Paul Huck in Miami said in a ruling Tuesday. (Click here for the ruling.)

“The law under which this case was tried stripped defendants of their basic right in any adversarial proceeding to produce evidence in their favor and rebut the plaintiffs’ claims,” Huck said.

According to the LAT, Dole argued at a four-day hearing before Huck that the 2001 Nicaraguan law is biased against defendants like itself. The statute was enacted to litigate injury claims against foreign corporations by banana workers and presumes the pesticide dibromochloropropane causes sterility and other injuries.

Writes Judge Huck:

For each of the 150 plaintiffs who recovered, the Judgment contains a conclusory statement that in the opinion of Dr. Umaña “[the plaintiff] is infertile” and states there is a “possible link” between DBCP exposure and various psychological problems or, in a few cases, physical problems. The Judgment does not explain how the sperm samples were evaluated to determine the causes of individual plaintiffs’ sperm impairments, it does not indicate that the doctors obtained or considered the plaintiffs’ medical histories, and it does not explain how DBCP is linked to the plaintiffs’ infertility or psychological damage.

Nicaraguan courts since 2002 have issued judgments in 32 such suits for a total of $2.05 billion against Dole and pesticide makers, Dole said. The company said that if the plaintiffs had won in Miami, their lawyers would try in U.S. courts to collect the other judgments that the companies have refused to pay.

“This is a powerful ruling,” said Ted Boutros, a lawyer for Dole. “It will be a major deterrent to bringing other verdicts to the U.S.”

Steven Marks, a Miami-based lawyer for the Nicaraguan workers, didn’t immediately comment to the LAT.