Lead Paint Defendants Seek to Upend $1B Public-Nuisance Finding
Three companies hit with a $1.15 billion lead paint judgment in California are hoping on Thursday to reverse a judge's finding that they created a public nuisance by promoting for decades a product that they knew was toxic.
August 23, 2017 at 04:58 PM
6 minute read
Three companies hit with a $1.15 billion lead paint judgment in California are hoping on Thursday to reverse a judge's finding that they created a public nuisance by promoting for decades a product that they knew was toxic.
Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries Inc. and ConAgra Grocery Products Co. will make their case before the California Sixth District Court of Appeal in San Jose, California. They face Danny Chou, assistant county counsel for Santa Clara County, one of 10 cities and counties in California hoping to uphold the 2014 judgment. If California wins, it would be the first government victory in a public nuisance case over lead paint. Other government cases in New Jersey, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin failed in their efforts to bring public nuisance claims over lead paint, which has been found to cause learning disabilities in children.
But unlike those cases, the main focus on Thursday will be whether Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg, who presided over a bench trial before issuing an 111-page statement of decision, failed to follow a standard that the Sixth District set forth in 2006 when it allowed the public nuisance claim to go forward in the case. “The plaintiff had to prove the defendants had intentional promotion of the use of lead paint in the interiors of buildings with the knowledge of the public health hazard that this use would create,” said Tony Dias, a partner in Washington, D.C., at Jones Day, who represents Sherwin-Williams.
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