On Monday, March 9th, the illness of a member of the jury led to a delay during the W.R. Grace & Co. environmental crimes trial. With the jury absent, defense lawyers fought to exclude the expert witness testimony of yet another government worker.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy excused all of the members of the jury during Monday’s court date due to the illness of one juror. It was not made clear if another juror would need to be selected.

The W. R. Grace company is a global chemical company. The company, along with five individual defendants, filed a motion Sunday to exclude the expert testimony of Dr. Aubrey Miller. Dr. Miller is an investigator with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the prosecution’s key witness. The defense was successful in an earlier attempt to limit the testimony of another key witness, Paul Peronard, who served as the EPA’s on-site coordinator in Libby after the town’s asbestos contamination first made headlines ten years ago.

Grace’s lawyers said Miller, as with Peronard, should not be allowed to discuss issues of public endangerment because “it does not fit the legal issue that the Government hopes to prove through its introduction at trial”.

The company and five one-time Grace officials are charged with a federal conspiracy involving Clean Air Act violations and obstruction of justice. The jury must find whether the company and its top employees knew they were endangering the community of Libby by mining the asbestos-laced ore; and whether they were violating federal law as they did so.

Thousands of Libby residents have been diagnosed with asbestos-related illnesses, including asbestosis and pleural mesothelioma cancer. Previous testimony from another doctor revealed that approximately one new case of asbestos-caused disease is diagnosed per week in Libby.

Source:

seattlepi.com

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