Jalisco’s Pasteurizer Gets 60 Days in Jail and a Fine

Jose Luis Medina, cheese maker for Jalisco Mexican Products Inc., was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days in Los Angeles County Jail and fined $9,300 in the aftermath of last year’s fatal food poisoning epidemic linked to his firm’s cheeses.

“In my heart I didn’t do anything (wrong),” Medina, 45, told reporters in quiet, broken English after his sentencing by Bellflower Municipal Judge James E. Pearce. And, as he has maintained all along, Medina said “I don’t know” when asked to comment on what caused the epidemic, which became California’s worst food poisoning case.

Although no exact figures were compiled, state and federal investigators estimate that between 20 and 40 people, mostly newborn Latino infants in the Los Angeles area, died from eating Jalisco soft Mexican-style cheeses.

However, federal, state and local investigators were never able to determine how the fatal bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes , got into Jalisco’s products--only that it was there.

As a result, without a specific source for the epidemic, coupled with the inability to prove that any Jalisco employee acted deliberately to taint the firm’s products, prosecutors had to proceed under the narrow legal doctrine of “strict product liability.” Under this rule, only criminal misdemeanor--and not more severe felony--penalties could be meted out.

Thomas A. Papageorge, chief of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s consumer protection division, and his chief deputy on the case, Clifford Klein, had asked that Medina be sentenced to 90 days in jail to send a “signal” to other manufacturers that California will not tolerate the production of adulterated food.

Pearce apparently agreed but moderated the jail sentence of Medina, a Jalisco vice president and the Artesia firm’s only licensed pasteurizer.

“Manufacturers of food products must realize their obligations to the public,” Pearce said before sentencing. “The law must be vigorously enforced.”

Pearce also ordered Medina to serve two years’ probation, during which time he could not participate in the manufacture of cheese.

Medina, a Mexican national who worked at the Jalisco plant for almost two decades, made no statement to the court. He was sentenced and fined after pleading no contest--in effect, guilty--to 12 criminal misdemeanor counts, which included manufacturing and selling adulterated products and operating an unsanitary food plant.

Jalisco President Gary McPherson of Pasadena, who pleaded no contest to similar charges, will be sentenced by Pearce next month.

In an emotional plea for no jail time, Medina’s attorney, Kenneth Sabo, drew a parallel to the mysterious outbreak of legionnaire’s disease in a Philadelphia hotel in 1976, in which 29 people died. Like the Philadelphia tragedy, Sabo said, the source of the Jalisco outbreak “never will be known.”

“Medina has suffered tremendously,” Sabo told the court, his voice breaking. “To put him in jail would just be horrible.”

Arguing against the probation report, which recommended a $1,000 fine and no jail time, Papageorge said that “a great deal went very wrong” at Jalisco and “the results were calamitous.”

Taking issue with Sabo’s observation that the plant had been given all but a clean bill of health by state agriculture officials, Papageorge said that if the plant had been so clean, “this type of poisoning wouldn’t have taken place.”

Attributing the epidemic to “carelessness in the operation of the plant,” Papageorge said the responsibility for producing wholesome products at Jalisco rested squarely on the shoulders “of the man who makes the cheese.”

Medina was given until June 30 to report to jail.