Example 3

U.S. News & World Report, Aug 11, 1986 v101 p8(1)

Dark days for toxic polluters. (corporate polluters in lawsuits)

"…In retrospect, the party most responsible for the cancer epidemic these chemicals may have produced was the city itself. Given that a toxic brew of chemicals had been floating through Woburn's Aberjona River valley for more than 150 years, it's mind-boggling that officials even considered pumping such water into people's homes. Yet they did. And, even though the consultant they hired in 1958 recommended against tapping such groundwater given its likely toxicity, they went ahead and sank two wells by the river--one in 1964 and one in 1967. (In fairness, the instruments of that day were too crude to detect the chemicals that were at issue in the trial.) When the 1979 test results came back--proving those suspicions correct--the state did the only thing it could at the time: it shut down the wells, permanently. And, after two decades of legislative initiatives, epidemiological studies, groundwater modeling, and cleanup efforts, that simple act of turning off the faucet stands as the only truly effective action government officials have ever taken.

Of course, that story isn't the focus of A Civil Action, as presented on screen. The film instead centers on the lawsuit that grew out of the Woburn families' perfectly justifiable desire to hold the corporations that they believed had actually polluted their water accountable--to force them to apologize and to make them pay. Yet the movie's retelling of this episode, and its relatively flattering portrayal of Schlichtmann, serve primarily to muddle the true message of the case.

To be sure, the odds were against Schlichtmann, who was up against the limits of science and was overmatched by Beatrice's and Grace's high-paid corporate lawyers. Yet he all but ensured his own defeat by walking away from a possible $8 million pretrial settlement with Beatrice and by allowing his poorly prepared star witness, Princeton University hydrogeologist George Pinder, to present an inaccurate theory of how groundwater moves in the Aberjona River valley. After a 78-day trial, the jury cleared Beatrice. And, though the jurors found Grace had negligently contaminated the wells, U.S. District Court Judge Walter Jay Skinner threw out the verdict and ordered a retrial because they supplied contradictory answers to Skinner's overly complex written instructions. Grace settled for $8 million, with each of the eight families Schlichtmann represented getting about $400,000. Not only was no apology forthcoming, but Grace continues to insist that chemicals dumped on its property never flowed into the wells. Those setbacks notwithstanding, there's no question that much has been learned as a result of Woburn. Schlichtmann himself personifies many of those lessons: these days, he talks about solving such cases through cooperation and mediation rather than courtroom confrontation, an approach he's now pursuing in a toxic-waste case strikingly similar to Woburn's, in Toms River, New Jersey. Yet the primary lesson of the Woburn story is, or should have been, for government to take responsible steps to protect the public in the first place. …"