DOVER, Del. (Legal Newsline) – Banana plantation workers who tried to sue in Delaware – despite working in Costa Rica, Ecuador and Panama – have again been told they cannot do so.
The Delaware Supreme Court on Jan. 12 rejected their appeal to a 2013 dismissal of their complaint, finding a motion to vacate that dismissal filed five years after it was too late.
“Not surprisingly, the Superior Court cited the two reasons for the delay offered by the plaintiffs – the burden of the many other DBCP cases counsel was handling and the time and research required to prepare the motion – and found them to be unpersuasive,” says the opinion, authored by Justice James Vaughn.
“We cannot say that the trial court’s conclusion exceeds the bounds of reason, especially when we consider that Plaintiffs’ motion… contains barely five pages of substantive text and only three unremarkable exhibits.
“The simplicity of the motion itself cannot be squared with the plaintiffs’ contention that it took seven months to untangle and explain the procedural history of this case in the motion.”
The workers, represented by Texas firm Hendler Flores and Delaware firm Dalton and Associates, claim they were exposed to a pesticide known as DBCP that caused injuries. Among the companies named as defendants were Dole Food Company, Chiquita Brands, Shell Oil and Dow Chemical.
The history of DBCP litigation began with a Texas class action in 1993. When a Texas federal court threw the case out two years later, it included a “return jurisdiction” clause that allowed the plaintiffs to sue in the U.S. if the courts in their home countries refused to hear their claims.
Those who refilled in Texas were denied class certification in 2010. One of those prospective class members later filed suit in Delaware Superior Court, while others filed suits in Louisiana federal court.
When the Delaware plaintiff defeated the defendants’ statute-of-limitations argument, three other cases popped up. One of them, filed on behalf of Eduardo Alvarado Chaverri and others, was the subject of the court’s recent opinion.
But many of the plaintiffs in the new Delaware cases were also plaintiffs in the Louisiana cases, leading the defendants to seek dismissal of the Delaware cases.
The plaintiffs lost the Louisiana cases, then lost the Delaware cases when the Superior Court decided to toss them because the Louisiana cases were filed first.
That happened in 2013. The Supreme Court affirmed dismissal a year later. It took four years for the plaintiffs to ask the Superior Court to reconsider its ruling on the grounds there were “groundbreaking” rulings in the other Delaware cases.
In those rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit revived cases previously dismissed by federal courts.
Plaintiffs lawyers in the Chaverri case claimed they were overburdened by the other DBCP cases, leading to a seven-month delay between the Third Circuit’s last ruling and the Chaverri motion for reconsideration.
The Superior Court found the lawyers’ heavy case load was their own fault for filing actions in various jurisdictions across the country. It also said there were not extraordinary circumstances that would cause it to change its decision, even if the motion had been filed on time.
“This case involves the application of different legal principles by courts in separate, sovereign jurisdictions,” Justice Vaughn wrote.
“What has happened here is a consequence of filing cases asserting the same or similar claims in courts of different jurisdictions where different principles of law may apply. By dividing the Plaintiffs’ claims between the federal and state courts of Delaware, Plaintiffs’ counsel rendered them not similarly situated and created a foreseeable risk that procedural rules of the two jurisdictions may lead to different results.”
Justice Karen Valihura dissented. She said the Third Circuit’s rebuke of the dismissal of the Louisiana dismissal was an “extraordinary” change in case law that should reopen the Superior Court case.
“(T)hese plaintiffs will be prevented from having their case heard on the merits, despite having pursued their rights vigilantly for more than a quarter of a century in multiple states and countries,” Valihura wrote.
“That injustice is magnified as they are now being treated differently from similarly situated plaintiffs whose cases followed nearly identical procedural paths but who filed in a federal courthouse just blocks up the street.”