WILMINGTON, Del. (Legal Newsline) - Weaving through a maze of different state laws, a Delaware judge dismissed some of more than 150 claims that Syngenta’s paraquat weed killer causes Parkinson’s disease, although other claims remain intact.
The multidistrict paraquat litigation resides in state court in Delaware but plaintiffs hail from many different states and made a variety of claims including breach of warranty, products liability and strict liability. While the substantive law of each plaintiff’s state applies in their case, Delaware courts impose their own procedural law, Superior Court Judge Sheldon Rennie ruled in a May 31 decision.
That meant lawsuits filed against John Does – a tactic designed to preserve claims against defendants who might emerge later – must be dismissed because Delaware doesn’t recognize fictitious names, the judge ruled.
“Filing a claim against ‘John Doe’ has no legal effect in this State,” he wrote.
The judge also dismissed all implied warranty claims made more than four years after a plaintiff received delivery of paraquat, or longer if the plaintiff’s state allows. Common law strict liability claims were eliminated from claims by plaintiffs in Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey and several other states, and all Delaware claims for strict liability were dismissed because that state doesn’t recognize it as a cause of action.
The remaining claims will proceed. Syngenta denies any connection between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s and none of the plaintiffs have diagnoses from their doctors attributing their disease to paraquat.