TEXAS – October 7, 2009 – A Brazoria County jury has awarded the widow of Danny Puckett, an industrial engineer and oil field consultant, $1.2 million for asbestos exposure from 1975 to 1980 that lead to his malignant mesothelioma — a terminal illness that often claims its victims within 12 to 18 months of diagnosis.

The verdict, handed down on Monday, October 5, 2009, represents the first known asbestos drilling mud additive verdict in Texas. Montello, Inc. and Union Carbide – the only remaining defendants at trial – were each assessed 15-percent liability of the $1.2 million award for causing Mr. Puckett’s mesothelioma.  Oklahoma law was applied to this case.

Mr. Puckett graduated from Oklahoma State University Tech with a degree in Industrial Engineering. In 1975 until 1985, he worked for Dowell Company as a member of the cement crew. Mr. Puckett eventually worked his way up to supervisor.

Mr. Puckett testified to breathing dust from the dumping of asbestos-containing cement additives into a mixing hopper at the bulk cement facility while working for Dowell Company. He used asbestos mud additives three to four  times per week at a minimum for four to five years, and described a “continuous smokestack” of dust, to the point that one couldn’t see a street light.

Mr. Puckett started his own oil field consulting practice in the late 1990s and had planned on continuing to work well into his 60s. He was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma in October 2008. He fought the disease for six months. Mr. Puckett leaves behind his wife of 23 years. He was 59-years-old.

Plaintiffs were represented by Scott L. Frost, Greg W. Lisemby, and Carrie B. Waters from the Dallas office of Waters & Kraus, LLP.

About Waters & Kraus, LLP
Waters & Kraus, LLP is a nationally recognized plaintiffs’ firm concentrating on complex product liability and personal injury/wrongful death cases, particularly asbestos-mesothelioma. In addition to toxic tort litigation, the firm’s diverse practice includes pharmaceutical product liability, negligence, elder financial abuse, class actions, and consumer product liability, as well as qui tam (whistleblower) and commercial litigation. With offices in Texas, California, and Maryland, Waters & Kraus, LLP has litigated cases in jurisdictions across the United States on behalf of individuals from all 50 states, as well as foreign governments.

— Case Fact Sheet Follows —

NEW YORK - A federal judge agreed to allow more than 1,000 property owners in St. Petersburg, Fla., to sue Raytheon Co., the world’s largest missile maker, as a group over claims it caused pollution that lowered their property values.

The residents accuse Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon of polluting the soil and groundwater around its St. Petersburg facility. The class-action certification means the owners don’t have to sue individually, making it easier and cheaper for them to pursue the litigation.

“The unique facts of this mass tort case make certification appropriate at this juncture,’’ US District Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington in Tampa, Fla., wrote after a three-day hearing.

In March 2008, the owners’ lawyers said the case was worth $400 million. They later dropped parts of the case, including a request that Raytheon be made to pay for medical monitoring of residents. The suit was originally filed in Florida state court in April 2008. Raytheon moved it to federal court the next month.

The case concerns about 1,300 residential and commercial properties in St. Petersburg, said Brian Barr, a lawyer for the owners at Levin Papantonio Thomas Mitchell Echsner & Proctor PA in Pensacola, Fla. Barr said he didn’t know the amount of the potential damages. They are “significantly less’’ than the original $400 million estimate, he said.

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Sean Conway was steamed at a Fort Lauderdale judge, so he did what millions of angry people do these days: he blogged about her, saying she was an “Evil, Unfair Witch.”

But Mr. Conway is a lawyer. And unlike millions of other online hotheads, he found himself hauled up before the Florida bar, which in April issued a reprimand and a fine for his intemperate blog post.

Mr. Conway is hardly the only lawyer to have taken to online social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, but as officers of the court they face special risks. Their freedom to gripe is limited by codes of conduct.

“When you become an officer of the court, you lose the full ability to criticize the court,” said Michael Downey, who teaches legal ethics at the Washington University law school.

And with thousands of blogs and so many lawyers online, legal ethics experts say that collisions between the freewheeling ways of the Internet and the tight boundaries of legal discourse are inevitable — whether they result in damaged careers or simply raise eyebrows.

Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, sees many more missteps in the future, as young people who grew up with Facebook and other social media enter a profession governed by centuries of legal tradition.

“Twenty-somethings have a much-reduced sense of personal privacy,” Professor Gillers said. Younger lawyers are, predictably, more comfortable with the media than their older colleagues, according to a recent survey for LexisNexis, the legal database company: 86 percent of lawyers ages 25 to 35 are members of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, as opposed to 66 percent of those over 46. For those just out of law school, “this stuff is like air to them,” said Michael Mintz, who manages an online community for lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

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Career federal prosecutor John Durham, who is overseeing the investigation of the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes, was tapped Monday to explore potential violations of anti-torture laws rooted in the interrogation of certain detainees, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said in a statement Monday afternoon.

The Department of Justice internal watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, submitted to Holder a report Monday that recommended the department re-examine earlier decisions, made under the Bush administration, to decline to prosecute apparent violations of anti-torture laws.

In reaching his decision to appoint a prosecutor, Holder also reviewed a 2004 report compiled by the CIA inspector general's office. "As a result of my analysis of all of this material, I have concluded that the information known to me warrants opening a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations," Holder said in a statement Monday.

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