Today, Grace, Beatrice, and three other property owners are paying for a multimillion-dollar project to clean up East Woburn: the Superfund law makes property owners responsible whether or not they actually contaminated their land.
Beatrice, unlike Grace, has never even admitted to responsibility for pollution on its own site. Last year, for instance, when routine testing revealed that one of the city wells contained trace amounts of TCE, Dever shut it down immediately — even though the amounts were far below the threshold set by the EPA.
Yet, in some respects, Woburn has the feel of a place that has come full circle rather than moved forward. Dever responds that the groundwater problem will be addressed in any construction plan. Former tannery owner John Riley has always insisted he never used any of the chemicals at issue in the suit.
Ironically, Grace is now the subject of another toxic-waste controversy. Among them: a Winchester dump site that allegedly contains contaminated materials from an old Grace chemical plant in Cambridge. A homeowner in the Winchester neighborhood, John Morgan, claims that TCE in the material leached north into the Woburn well that was shut down last year. Grace has emphatically denied all allegations. Here are the remains of the well house. In , then-mayor John Rabbitt ordered it knocked down, during the trial, as a way of dramatizing the fact that the contaminated well water was no longer being used.
Ahead is the swamp that lies on either side of the Aberjona River, choked with eight-foot-tall reeds. But looks can be deceptive. Here and there are pipes — wells drilled into the groundwater to test for contamination. Across the way, on the 15 acres Schlichtmann alleged was contaminated by the Riley tannery, an immense expanse of rocks has been spread out, dotted with manholes and bright-orange cones, part of a cleanup project that will, in all likelihood, take decades to complete. Jimmy Anderson would be 30 if he were alive.
It is a simple, unavoidable truth that haunts Anne Anderson every day. She gives her big old golden retriever, Charlie, a pat. My family and friends from back then who went through this with me, we never talk about it. In fact, the adversarial system of justice is ill-suited to deciding the kinds of highly complex issues in cases such as the Woburn toxic-waste suit. After many months of this, six ordinary men and women were herded into a little room and forced to decide whose theory was the most convincing.
Thus was the fatally confused verdict virtually guaranteed. After sitting through all but five of the 78 days of trial, I have some qualifications for observing what went wrong, and how similar trials could be made better. What follows are a few modest proposals. Skip to content. The only role for a jury in such a case should be to determine the level of damages. Granted, Judge Walter Jay Skinner was no more technically adept than the postal clerks and retired nurses who made up the jury.
Just the facts: Once a judge has ruled that a lawsuit meets some minimal standard for moving forward, the court itself, rather than the lawyers, should investigate the facts. Admittedly, this would present some problems, mainly over who would pay for an expensive, drawn-out investigation.
But the benefits of a neutral, objective investigation headed by a court-appointed master would far outweigh any possible objections. He was unsuccessful, because the EPA had a court-approved exemption from having to testify in private lawsuits.
As EPA officials put it during the trial, take away their exemption and they would end up spending more time testifying than working. But there should be some way of balancing the concerns of government agencies with the need for unbiased, authoritative information.
Follow Following. Media Nation Join 2, other followers. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Brash enough, too, to open his own firm at age 31 with two friends, Kevin Conway and Bill Crowley. He threw a huge bash shortly after he had the office renovated. Hundreds of people attended. Waiters in black tie served champagne. Traffic backed up for hours while a crane hoisted a grand piano through the second-story window.
This was the Jan Schlichtmann of the s: In the era of greed, he was as ostentatious as a Wall Street broker—he drove a black Porsche, lived on Beacon Hill, and bought furniture for the office from a former White House designer—but also so obsessed with his cases that he took only one at a time, the better to focus his energy. That helped Schlichtmann become very, very good at what he did. The biggest plaintiffs firm in New York had already turned down the case, as had two Boston firms.
They viewed it as too complicated, the chance of victory too slim. Plus, the defendant was MGH, one of the greatest hospitals in the world. He turned it down. Lawyers around town whispered about the crazy young attorney who had refused a million-dollar settlement from MGH. It was thought to be the largest malpractice award in Massachusetts history.
In East Woburn, eight families had lost children to leukemia over a span of two decades. Schlichtmann contended that two nearby companies, the W. Grace chemical plant and the John J. Riley Tannery, had dumped their chemical waste onto the grounds of their properties, sometimes in gallon drums, and that waste had seeped into the drinking wells.
Once in the drinking supply, Schlichtmann argued, the concentration of chemicals had been high enough to have caused the cancer that killed the children. It was a bold claim, made all the bolder because environmental law was in its infancy then, the link between chemicals and the cancers they caused legally irrelevant if not nonexistent.
One day, deep into the discovery phase of the Woburn case, Schlichtmann learned how delusional his cause really was. See that big computer room over there? Now let me ask you, Mr. Trial Lawyer: How many cases have been won where it was proved that cigarette smoking causes cancer?
And you want to do it with none? On the flight back to Boston, well into his second scotch, Schlichtmann thought, What are you going to do? And he would not back away from his version of the truth, from his sense of what was right. Which was a very lucky thing. It may have been valiant to spend that much on research, but it was also stupid. Before it was over, secretaries and paralegals were working without pay. Crowley had to use his Westwood home as collateral for a loan for the firm.
Conway had to use his Wellesley home as collateral—twice. His wife still refuses to go to the annual Woburn gatherings for this reason. Schlichtmann fell behind on his mortgage and started living in the office. But none of the partners regretted the case. Not when they were in it. This sort of change does not come easily, though.
In the Woburn case, the opposing counsel, Jerome Facher, a senior partner at the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, convinced Judge Walter Skinner to break the immensely complicated trial into two parts. But the bifurcation benefited Facher and the defense attorneys for W. Grace in two ways. First, it gave the defense teams two trials, which put an added burden of proof on Schlichtmann.
Were the tannery and W. If the jury believed that, the case would move on to the next question: Were the chemicals in the water responsible for giving the children cancer? Their tragic losses were his most compelling pieces of evidence. Grace was minimal. Schlichtmann said the incident, which actually took place in the other attorney's office, was designed to elicit a settlement figure from him but was not an offer to settle.
When the case was over, Schlichtmann lost his partners, his career and "got the hell out of town" by moving to Hawaii. He returned to Boston in to start over, which has meant marriage and two young sons. Since the movie, he is especially in demand on the lecture circuit. On this night, he politely autographed copies of the paperback, which has a large photo of Travolta on the cover.
Schlichtmann is tall, almost lanky, and has a quiet manner that is more reminiscent of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart than steely-eyed Travolta. These days Schlichtmann isn't a litigator, though he's still pursuing environmental cases. In communities such as Toms River, N.
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