LAUREL (AP) — The DuPont Co. has asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to throw out a $14 million jury verdict awarded to an oyster fisherman who claimed chemicals from a Gulf Coast plant caused his rare blood cancer.

The award to Glen Strong of Bay St. Louis in August 2005 came in the first of nearly 2,000 cases against the second largest titanium dioxide maker in the nation.

A Jones County jury also awarded Strong’s wife, Connie, $1.5 million for loss of “love and companionship.”

The jury failed to reach agreement on punitive damages.

In documents filed this week, DuPont claims it was unfairly prevented from calling experts to testify, such as doctors and scientists who the company has said would have shown the company’s plant in Delisle was not the cause of Strong’s cancer.

DuPont DeLisle is located about five miles from Strong’s home. The DeLisle plant makes titanium dioxide, a white pigment used in paint, plastics, toothpaste and other products.

Strong’s lawyers claimed dioxins — chemicals that that can be hazardous even in small amounts — entered Strong’s body through the air and by eating oysters harvested from St. Louis Bay. Strong told jurors he ate oysters about four times a week.

DuPont called no witnesses in its defense, relying on testimony of Strong’s doctor who said there was no way to determine the root of multiple myeloma, according to the court record.

Before the trial began, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld sanctions issued by Circuit Judge Billy Joe Landrum excluding nine DuPont witnesses from testifying in the case. Landrum said DuPont lawyers “deliberately avoided” depositions of its witnesses by not giving Strong’s attorneys an opportunity to interview them before the trial.

In its appeal, DuPont questioned whether the lower court was fair in judging the company based on the plaintiff’s “reliance on junk science” and a “failure to offer competent proof” of an actual cause of Strong’s cancer or whether the illness was a direct result of exposure to DuPont dioxins.

Information from:

The Sun Herald

http://www.sunherald.com