Reading choice generates new trial motion

摘要

Citing new information about a juror's recreational reading during breaks in a 1997 court case, lawyers for a Philadelphia-based chemical manufacturer are requesting a new trial. Sharon A. Dennison, manager of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Bustleton Avenue branch, was a juror during the trial of Rohm and Haas v. Continental Casualty, in which Rohm and Haas sued two insurance companies to recover environmental cleanup costs at two Superfund sites. According to the motion, Dennison was exposed to extraneous prejudicial information by reading Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, the Legal Intelligencer reported January 2. The bestselling book tells the story of a suit brought against W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods by families of eight leukemia victims who lived near the defendants' plant in Woburn, Massachusetts, and claimed that the defendants' dumping of a cancer-causing industrial solvent had caused their children'sillness. "This is not a case where a juror may merely have glanced at a newspaper or magazine article or been briefly exposed to something on television," the motion for a new trial stated. "Rather, during trial, a vocal and out-spoken juror chose to read a long, detailed and highly prejudicial book about a case--also involving groundwater contamination allegedly caused by large corporations--which she described as 'just like this case.'" Although the jury decided for the insurers, trial judge Paul L. Jaffe later set the verdict aside and awarded dollar 21 million in damages to Rohm and Haas. In May 1999, the Pennsylvania Superior Court reinstated the jury's verdict, holding that the judge had been wrong to set aside the jury's finding that Rohm and Haas had not disclosed contamination when it purchased the insurance policies. It was when a Rohm and Haas lawyer called Jaffe to tell him his ruling had been overturned that Jaffe revealed Dennison had made remarks about the book to him.