ORLANDO, Fla. (Legal Newsline) - Dozens of Orlando-area plaintiffs hoping to show Lockheed Martin's weapons plant there caused their illnesses have lost two of their key witnesses.
A federal judge on Dec. 26 found that the report of one of the plaintiffs' proposed expert witnesses "is missing virtually any hallmarks of reliability." Dr. Daniel Kantor was supposed to testify contaminants from the Lockheed site cause multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease.
But Judge Roy Dalton granted the company's motion to exclude Kantor's testimony and tossed the claims of plaintiffs with those diseases. Several similar cases have been filed, and Dalton's ruling came in one brought by 60 plaintiffs.
Kantor claimed five substances - PCE, TCE, toluene, xylenes and styrene - could cause MS and Parkinson's.
"Dr. Kantor's deposition makes plain that his report is missing virtually any hallmarks of reliability," the ruling says.
"For instance, Dr. Kantor testified that he categorized the studies he pulled based on design, confounders, biases and other limitations - a key part of an epidemiological review - but he does not actually conduct this categorization in his report, nor does he explain the criteria he used to pull these studies in the first place."
Kantor wanted to use the "weight of the evidence" approach to justify his findings. He reviewed the opinions of public health agencies, further studied the epidemiological research cited in them and looked at animal studies.
Dalton placed the most importance on his review of epidemiological literature and found several faults with it, calling his approach "unsound."
His testimony said he used the nine-factor test, called Bradford Hill, to analyze the studies, but Dalton says that test was not mentioned in his report.
"Standing on their own, the report's failures to describe each step of Dr. Kantor's process cast serious doubt on the reliability of his weight of the evidence approach," Dalton wrote.
"But the indicators of unreliability do not stop there. How did Dr. Kantor use these studies that he purportedly ensured were reliably designed and showed relevant associations (conclusions the Court cannot vet because they do not appear in the report)?
"Well, he extrapolated 'trends' from them to reach his causation opinion—but, notably, he included statistically insignificant associations in those trends."
Dalton also tossed the opinion of a second expert, Dr. Ronald Kendall, whose report relied in part on Kantor's.
"With no explanation of his methodology and a mere wholesale adoption of other experts' opinions, Dr. Kendall's report is wholly unreliable," Dalton wrote.
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys at Morgan & Morgan, while Lockheed Martin is represented by Christopher White and others from Greenberg Traurig.