It was the first trial C. Michael Carter ever attended, And it felt like a nightmare. As general counsel of The Dole Food Company, Inc., he had refused to settle claims with 54 Nicaraguan plantation workers who alleged that they were injured by a pesticide decades earlier. His trial counsel had knocked out all but a dozen claims. But the testimony dragged on for four-and-a-half months in a Los Angeles county court known for plaintiff-friendly verdicts. And the witnesses, he felt certain, were lying.
The plaintiffs in the Tellez v. Dole trial, which began in July 2007, claimed they’d been rendered sterile while working on Dole’s banana plantations in Nicaragua 30 years earlier. The cause, they said, was a pesticide called dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, which has been linked to male sterility. Dole, based in Westlake Village, California, had settled thousands of claims over the years. But Carter didn’t believe the men on the witness stand had ever even worked for Dole. Yet—and this was part of the nightmare—he couldn’t be sure. The company’s records in Nicaragua were destroyed sometime after 1979, when the Sandinistas took over the country and Dole eventually fled.
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