ATLANTA (Legal Newsline) - Lawyers representing dozens of Orlando-area plaintiffs against Lockheed Martin are appealing a Florida federal judge's decision to throw out some of the claims, based on unreliable scientific testimony.
T. Michael Morgan filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Feb. 7, weeks after Judge Roy Dalton granted Lockheed's motion to disqualify expert witnesses who claimed contaminants from the company's plant caused multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease.
Several similar cases have been filed, and Dalton's ruling came in one brought by 60 plaintiffs - though not all are suffering from MS or Parkinson's. Dr. Daniel Kantor was brought in to testify about those diseases, but Dalton wouldn't allow it and granted judgment on those claims to Lockheed.
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," Judge Dalton wrote on Dec. 26.
"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.