ORLANDO, Fla. (Legal Newsline) - More plaintiffs have been booted from a Florida toxic tort lawsuit because the expert hired by lawyers to connect their cancers to substances released at a Lockheed Martin plant plagiarized the work of a research group.
Judge Roy Dalton, in Orlando federal court, on March 18 granted Lockheed Martin's motion to exclude the testimony of Dr. Dipak Panigrahy, a pathologist who was to testify that seven substances released at an Orlando plant can cause eight types of cancer that affect 22 plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Several similar cases have been filed, and this one was brought on behalf of more than 60 plaintiffs. Earlier Dalton rulings tossed testimony on autism, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease and dismissed the claims of 14 plaintiffs.
Panigrahy's testimony alleged TCE, PCE, HCHO, arsenic, hexavalent chromium, trichloroethylene and styrene could cause these cancers: kidney, breast, thyroid, pancreatic, liver and bile duct, testicular, anal, Hodgkin's lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and leukemia.
Lockheed claimed he wrote word-for-word from an International Agency for Research on Cancer publication.
"Dr. Panigrahy's report is - put plainly - a mess," Dalton wrote. "The Court simply cannot put this testimony before a jury."
Though plagiarism isn't an automatic disqualification, Dalton said it was so "blatant that it represents deliberate lack of candor."
"Here, there is no question that Dr. Panigrahy extensively plagiarized his report," he added. A side-by-side comparison speaks for itself.
"And his deposition made the plagiarism appear deliberate, as he repeatedly outright refused to acknowledge the long swaths of his report that quote other work verbatim without any quotation marks at all - instead stubbornly insisting that he cited over 1,100 references, as if that resolves the attribution issue (it does not)."
This plagiarism demonstrates an unreliable methodology, Dalton found.
"Indeed, the plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy's own work - a task that neither he nor Plaintiffs' counsel even attempts to tackle," he wrote.
Panigrahy, when copying the IARC report, deleted sentences in which IARC urged caution about the limitation of its findings.
T. Michael Morgan of Morgan & Morgan represents the rest of the plaintiffs who haven't lost their case.