SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Legal Newsline) – No federal judge in Sacramento wants to hear a key lawsuit that will decide if coffee should come with a could-cause-cancer label.
Instead, one of the Eastern District of California’s two Fresno judges – Dale Drozd – will step in to hear a case filed by the California Chamber of Commerce that challenges the chemical acrylamide’s placement on the state’s notorious Prop 65 list.
Products that contain chemicals on the list need warning labels. But CalChamber says acrylamide – which occurs naturally in foods that have been roasted like coffee beans – hasn’t been definitively found to cause cancer in humans.
It’s a position that the original judge hearing the case – Kim Mueller – agreed with before an intervening group with more than 100 pending lawsuits against companies like Starbucks got involved.
Five months after Mueller ordered a preliminary injunction against new acrylamide lawsuits, the Council for Education and Research on Toxics filed a motion to disqualify her. CERT is a nonprofit whose only mission appears to be filing lawsuits. It does not even maintain a website.
CERT said Mueller’s husband, Robert Johnson Slobe, is the president of the North Sacramento Chamber of Commerce, but CalChamber responded that the NSCC is no longer a member of CalChamber (though it was a member at the beginning of the case).
Slobe is also the president of the North Sacramento Land Company, which operates an almond ranch in Colusa County – “roasted almonds are a significant source of acrylamide,” the motion to disqualify says.
Mueller slammed the group’s tactics but recused herself anyway. After she did, all other Sacramento federal judges refused to take the case.
Mueller said reasonable people could not believe she’d have a financial interest in the future of acrylamide litigation but chose to step down anyway. She slammed CERT for filing a reply brief that exceeded a page limit and submitting a supplemental brief without seeking permission to do so.
“CERT even pursued relief on an emergency basis in an unsuccessful petition for a writ of mandamus from the Ninth Circuit after this court had directed CERT to published decisions in which the circuit had rejected its position,” Mueller wrote.
She calls CERT’s and HLF’s tactics “uncommonly aggressive” and “scorched earth.” Many of their claims about her business interests are incorrect, and they even got her home address wrong, she says.
“I cannot exclude the possibility that these details were included in an attempt to engender public animus against me and to increase the personal costs of my continued assignment to this action, including the costs of safety and security to my husband and myself, which is no phantom worry,” Mueller wrote.
Judge Drozd is a Barack Obama-appointee who served as a magistrate judge in the Eastern District for 18 years before taking office in 2015. The U.S. Senate had confirmed Drozd that year with a 69-21 vote.