R.I. high court overturns lead paint verdict
Setback in state efforts to get companies to pay for home cleaning
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Rhode Island’s Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a first-in-the-nation jury verdict against three former lead paint producers, a closely watched case that has been seen as bellwether for potential suits across the country.
The 4-0 decision spares the companies from potentially billions in cleanup costs for hundreds of thousands of contaminated homes.
Rhode Island was the first state to successfully sue former makers of lead pigment and paint, which can cause learning disabilities, brain damage and other health problems in children. A jury in 2006 found Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries, Inc. and Millennium Holdings LLC liable for creating a public nuisance.
The state had proposed that the companies spend $2.4 billion inspecting and cleaning hundreds of thousands of Rhode Island homes believed to contain lead paint.
The ruling was immediately denounced by groups supporting punitive action against paint companies.
“A lot of hopes were pinned on Rhode Island,” said Ralph Scott, community projects director of the Alliance for Healthy Homes, a Washington advocacy group.
The court, however, said the state’s lawsuit should have been dismissed at the outset. It said that while lead paint may be a public health problem, it was not the companies’ responsibility to clean it up because they, unlike landlords and homeowners, had no control over how the paint was used or if it was used in properties where children were poisoned.
“Our hearts go out to those children whose lives forever have been changed by the poisonous presence of lead,” Chief Justice Frank Williams wrote in the opinion. “But, however grave the problem of lead poisoning is in Rhode Island, public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm.”
Lawsuits over lead paint have failed to live up to early hopes that they would mirror the success that states had in the 1990s with suits against the tobacco industry, which ultimately resulted in billions worth of settlements. Unlike tobacco, lead-based paint has not been sold for decades.
It has been virtually impossible to determine which company’s paint poisoned an individual child or was used in a certain home.
A lawyer for Sherwin-Williams called the ruling a “victory for common sense.”
“This case never should have been filed,” said Charles H. Moellenberg, Jr. “It was factually wrong and legally flawed. A company should not be held liable when there is no proof that it did anything wrong.”
The companies said the state never presented any evidence that their products were used in any Rhode Island home or had even been sold in the state.
Shares of Sherwin-Williams rose 4.3 percent to $47.92 and shares of NL Industries rose 3.5 percent to $9.86.
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