Jury deliberates city of Milwaukee's lead paint lawsuit
(Published Thursday, June 21, 2007 10:14:16 AM CST)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Associated Press
MILWAUKEE - Jurors deliberated Wednesday following three weeks of testimony in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by the city of Milwaukee against a manufacturer of lead pigments that was used in paint until the 1970s.
Nearly 50 people packed the courtroom for closing arguments Tuesday in the $52.6 million suit. The city is asking the manufacturer, NL Industries Inc., to pay for the clean up of lead paint in some 11,000 homes, almost all of them in poor neighborhoods. The jury started deliberating Tuesday.
The federal government banned lead paint in 1978, but it's still present in older buildings. Lead in the bloodstream can cause neurological damage and learning disabilities, especially in children.
According to evidence presented at the trial, more than 7,000 of the city's children were found in 1996 to have lead in their blood at levels deemed unsafe.
Richard Lewis, the lead attorney for the city, has contended in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court case that NL Industries created a public nuisance that poisoned thousands of Milwaukee youngsters and conspired with others to create the nuisance.
Donald Scott, NL's primary lawyer in the case, has claimed that the dangers were public knowledge, yet the city of Milwaukee and the federal government mandated the use of lead paint for their projects into the 1970s because it is so durable.
The problem is not lead paint but the lack of property upkeep, he argued. Although some 90 percent of the homes built before the 1940s used lead paint, almost all of the problems are in central city neighborhoods where the properties are not maintained, he added.
Lewis said the city has gone after landlords, and has gotten voluntary compliance in some cases and sued in others. The city has targeted and paid for removing the lead from around windows, he said, adding that the friction created by opening and closing the windows created the dust that made the children ill.
Milwaukee had also sued Madison-based Mautz paint, now owned by Sherwin-Williams, but that part of the lawsuit was severed for this trial.
On June 12, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against St. Louis over who should pay to clean up lead paint in homes, upholding a lower court's finding that the city could not proceed with a lawsuit against makers of lead paint.
That city sought to calculate damages based upon a company's market share. But Missouri's high court found that court precedent requires the suing party, whether a government entity or not, to identify the maker of a product it claims has caused harm.
A state jury in Rhode Island found NL Industries, Sherwin-Williams and Millennium Holdings LLC liable in February of 2006 for creating a public nuisance by manufacturing and selling lead paint. The verdict, reached after 10 days of deliberations, has been appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court.
Ohio's attorney general sued 10 paint manufacturers and chemical companies, including Sherwin-Williams and DuPont, in April.
