UFW Appeals Verdict, Charges Bailiff Misconduct : Lawsuit: Union seeks to upset $2.9-million award to lettuce grower over secondary boycott. It claims that court official peppered jurors with negative comments.

The United Farm Workers union has appealed a $2.9-million verdict in favor of a major lettuce grower on the grounds that a bailiff peppered the jurors with negative comments about the UFW and its supporters.

“It was a trial without the attributes of constitutional due process,” said UFW attorney Michael Aguirre of San Diego.

During the recent Yuma, Ariz., trial, Aguirre clashed repeatedly with Judge Joseph D. Howe over rulings that he alleged were biased against the UFW, including Howe’s decision to continue the trial despite the death of Cesar Chavez on the opening day. Aguirre is seeking either a directed verdict in favor of the UFW or a new trial.

In the appeal, filed Monday in Yuma County Superior Court, a former FBI agent hired by Aguirre to interview jurors says that bailiff Hank Green showed disdain for UFW supporters who camped on the courthouse lawn, called them rabble-rousers, and indicated to jurors that the supporters could pose a danger.

The monetary award, meant to compensate Bruce Church Inc. for losses due to a UFW boycott, came on a 9-3 jury vote, the minimum needed. UFW leaders believe that without the bailiff’s comments, one or more jurors might have sided with the UFW, preventing a verdict in favor of Church.

Green and Presiding Judge H. Stewart Bradshaw, who is Green’s supervisor, declined to comment on the appeal. The appeal also includes a host of legal issues about inadmissibility of evidence and whether the Yuma court had jurisdiction.

Former FBI Agent Ken Oliver, who is a private investigator, said jurors reported that Green had told them that the judge, while the jury was not present, had chastised and fined Aguirre and threatened to put him in jail if he persisted.

One juror allegedly told Oliver that Green said of the UFW supporters: “They don’t work, these are the rabble-rousers, the main strikers, the ones who go into the fields and get the workers all riled up.”

Several jurors, according to Oliver, said Green warned them to park behind the courthouse to avoid any confrontations with the UFW supporters who conducted a peaceful 24-hour vigil outside the courthouse during the trial’s final week.

The verdict, returned June 10, came in the retrial of a damage suit brought by Church over the UFW’s “high-tech” boycott of grocery stores in the 1980s that was intended to force Church into signing a contract. Jurors found that the union had violated an Arizona law, in effect, protecting businesses from secondary boycotts.

UFW backers have long complained that Church, which is based in Salinas, filed the suit in Arizona to take advantage of that state’s political climate, which is more conservative and anti-union than California’s. Church attorneys replied that much of the lettuce that was boycotted was grown in Arizona.

“The bailiff was just a projection of what was going on in that court,” UFW official David Martinez said. “We believe the bailiff felt he had the court’s implicit approval to carry out his outrageous conduct.”

Attorneys for Church in Yuma and Phoenix could not be reached for comment.