HELENA – “The O.J. verdict of environmental crime.”
That’s how a member of the public, posting to the University of Montana’s W.R. Grace trial blog, characterized Friday’s verdict in which Grace and three former executives were acquitted on all counts.
Others were also in disbelief.
“They have gotten away with murder. That’s all I can say,” Gayla Benefield of Libby, who suffers health effects from asbestos exposure and lost both parents to asbestos-related lung diseases, told The Associated Press.
The federal government had charged Grace and the former executives with knowingly allowing Libby residents to be exposed to asbestos from Grace’s vermiculite mine in northwestern Montana.
Attorneys for some Libby residents blame the tremolite asbestos for about 2,000 cases of illness and about 225 deaths in and around the community.
That was in the mind of another person who posted to the UM site, striking a much more somber note: “Sorry dad, I guess the people responsible for your death get off scot-free.”
But the UM blog also attracted at least one pro-Grace comment.
“I agree in light of the poor evidence and all. It was the correct verdict,” a blogger said.
The Grace trial had been described as one of the largest environmental criminal trials in U.S. history. Andrew King-Ries, an assistant professor at the University of Montana School of Law, called it “one of the most complex and creative criminal prosecutions in the history of environmental regulation.”
But government prosecutors seemed to be fighting an uphill battle from the start.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy was visibly frustrated at times, at one point telling prosecutors they “presented discombobulated allegations and you don’t understand the evidence yourself.”
There also were allegations of prosecutorial misconduct during the trial.
Molloy sharply limited the scope of testimony of some of the expert witnesses the government presented. He as much as accused one of those witnesses, former Grace employee Robert Locke, of perjury and told the jury to disregard much of Locke’s testimony.
“He came as close as I would ever want to see to perjury,” Molloy said.
University of Michigan Law Professor David Uhlmann said Friday that the government had to try the case in front of a judge who on multiple occasions had his pretrial rulings reversed.
“He (Molloy) was hostile to the government in court,” Uhlmann, a former chief of the environmental crimes section in the U.S. Justice Department, told the AP.
“Obviously it did not help the government that the judge presiding over the case was so antagonistic,” Uhlmann said.
Among those appellate reversals was the ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, overturning Molloy’s ruling that 34 asbestos exposure victims on the federal prosecutors’ list of witnesses would not be allowed in court except to testify.
Molloy had said the 34 did not meet the meaning of “crime victim” in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
However, federal prosecutors then did an about-face, telling the court they had polled the 34 and that all had waived their right to be present at the trial.
Another blow to the government’s case came when Molloy, after excusing jurors, questioned prosecutors’ charges that Grace conspired to obstruct justice by lying to EPA investigators and that the company violated the federal Clean Air Act by releasing asbestos dust they knew would cause death and illness.
“Tell me what document, what testimony is there that shows these people had an agreement to do something illegal,” Molloy said. “What is it that you can hang your hat on that proves they agreed to commit an illegal act? If you can’t prove that, then you can’t prove your case.”
Molloy excluded all but seven of 53 exhibits that prosecutors submitted as evidence, mostly documents and memos written by and distributed to high-ranking Grace officials, including the former executives on trial.
Molloy said the majority of the documents were more than two decades old and didn’t relate to the Clean Air Act’s criminal statute, which wasn’t enacted until 1990. The judge said the evidence was more suited to a products liability claim than to the commission of a crime.
And Molloy dismissed charges against two of the five former Grace executives named as defendants after prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to secure convictions against the two.