MONTPELIER, Vt. (Legal Newsline) - The Vermont Supreme Court won't change the window for asbestos claimants to sue, rejecting a call from a Dallas plaintiffs firm to do so.
The court on May 10 held the state's 20-year statute of repose does not violate the state constitution, finding Shirley Ann Carpin's lawsuit over the mesothelioma death of her mother was filed too late.
The statute of repose requires lawsuits within 20 years of the "last occurrence" to which the asbestos-related disease can be attributed. Testimony traced Shirley Hilster's last exposure to 1995, but her daughter didn't file suit until 2021.
Represented by Kristin Ross of Rousseau & Ross in New Hampshire and Benjamin Braly and Todd Barnes of Dean, Omar, Branham Shirley in Dallas, Carpin tried to argue the law containing the statute of repose was wrong.
"Although it may appear unfair to bar plaintiff's claims under §518(a), especially when the repose period expired before Hilster was diagnosed with mesothelioma, that is the result of the policy expressed in the statute," Justice Harold Eaton wrote.
"Statutes of repose like the one at issue seek to provide defendants with 'certainty' and 'eliminat[e] potential abuses from stale claims' at the cost of 'denying certain plaintiffs a remedy at common law for injury.'"
Hilster's husband was a pipefitter who regularly had asbestos on his clothes. The appeal concerned Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power, where he had worked in 1971-72.
He retired in 1995, marking Hilster's last significant exposure to asbestos. She did in 2020, leading her daughter to sue.
The statute of repose that barred her claim violated the state constitution, lawyers claimed. Article 7 says government is instituted for the common benefit of the people and not for the particular advantage of a single set of persons who are a part only of that community.
Eaton's opinion notes the courts past rejections of attempts to invalidate statutes that provide procedural limitations
"(T)he statute of repose does not arbitrarily disadvantage any part of the community," Eaton wrote.
"We have not recognized people with latent diseases as a suspect class and, more generally, have often narrowly defined what groups constitute suspect classes.... Imposing time limits on causes of action, such as a statute of repose, is a valid and 'long-standing legislative prerogative.'"
The decision affirmed Superior Court judge Helen Toor's April 2023 ruling.