IBM Found Not Liable for Ex-Workers’ Cancers
IBM Corp. was cleared of responsibility Thursday for the cancers that developed in two former workers who built hard-disk drives in its San Jose factory. Minutes later, the computer giant vowed to go after the cancer-stricken plaintiffs for legal costs.
After a four-month trial, a jury in Santa Clara County Superior Court returned with a unanimous verdict of not liable on the second day of deliberation. Alida Hernandez and James Moore needed to prove seven claims laid out by the judge, but they failed to convince the jury of the very first: that they had been systemically poisoned by chemicals at the San Jose plant.
Hernandez, 73, said she often was splashed with chemicals used to coat disks and clean equipment at the IBM plant, where she worked for more than a dozen years. She had a mastectomy after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993.
Moore, 62, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after working in the same plant for more than 20 years. He complained of headaches, blurred vision, blackouts and severe nasal congestion.
IBM’s lawyer said the jury’s swift decision would discourage further lawsuits. Hernandez and Moore were the first of more than 200 plaintiffs to argue in court that exposure to trichloroethylene, benzene and other chemicals gave them cancer and caused their children to be born with birth defects.
The suits have threatened the high-tech industry’s reputation as clean and safe.
“I’d like to pay tribute to the common sense and intelligence of the American jury,” Bob Weber, the lawyer representing IBM, said after the verdict. “Their common sense carried them through months of smoke and mirrors by the plaintiffs.”
Weber said he planned to file a motion seeking to force Hernandez and Moore to reimburse IBM for its legal costs, which he called “substantial” but still undetermined. Previous cases of similar length have racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM had a profit of $7.6 billion last year on $89 billion in sales.
“When a plaintiff says, ‘We’ll pick our two best cases and try them,’ and then they can’t even create enough of an issue to get the jury to deliberate two days, that sends a statement,” Weber said.
But Richard Alexander, the attorney for Hernandez and Moore, said he would press on with lawsuits on behalf of former IBM employees in other states. The next courtroom fight is scheduled to begin Tuesday in White Plains, N.Y. Alexander said he expected to use several key pieces of evidence barred from the California case.
For example, IBM has collected a trove of information on the health of its workers, including 30,000 death records. Santa Clara Superior Court Judge Robert Baines refused to admit into evidence a study offered by an expert for the plaintiffs that was based on those records.
“The real story will be told in New York,” Alexander said. “All the evidence that was excluded in this case will be included.”
In California, most workplace injury claims are covered under workers’ compensation laws. In addition to proving that they had suffered from systemic chemical poisoning at work, Hernandez and Moore had to convince the jury that IBM knew the plaintiffs were getting sick at work and didn’t tell them and that IBM’s concealment caused the sickness to escalate and become cancer.
Failure to prove any of those claims would require a not-guilty verdict, Baines told the jury Tuesday.
Proving a link between cancer and the chemicals at the San Jose factory is extremely difficult, and the verdict in the Santa Clara case will deter future lawsuits, said Frederick J. Ufkes, a Los Angeles lawyer with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart who is not involved in the IBM case.
“I believe that this verdict will discourage many plaintiffs’ lawyers from taking on these types of cases because of the difficulties of proof and the tremendous expense,” he said. “In order for this litigation to be attractive to plaintiffs lawyers, there has to be some realistic expectation of return.”
IBM shares rose as high as $97.23 in extended trading after the verdict, then settled back to $96.79, their closing price Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange. They gained 25 cents during regular trading.
