Stalled asbestos lawsuits dropped
Decisions come after thousands had waited years for their day in court
Thousands of asbestos-poisoning lawsuits that have been stuck in a decades-long backlog in Baltimore Circuit Court are now being dropped as no longer viable.
Plaintiffs attorneys led by the Peter G. Angelos law firm pushed in recent years to lump several thousand pending cases together for settlement — a strategy that once helped Angelos win a fortune’s worth of compensation for people who worked with asbestos and their attorneys.
Supporters of the effort said consolidation would speed the road to justice for victims of asbestos poisoning in the workplace, but critics argued that combining the workers’ claims would tilt the legal scales in favor of plaintiffs.
Neither judges nor the legislature agreed to the move. Now, with that effort apparently failed, cases are being dropped en masse.
The Angelos firm recently told the Baltimore Circuit Court, which has handled asbestos lawsuits from across the state, that it had dropped more than 3,800 cases since March of last year. The firm has about two-thirds of the asbestos cases pending in the court.
The Law Offices of Peter T. Nicholl, which has most of the rest, has also been dismissing cases at a rate of more than 150 a month.
A trust that represents a bankrupt contractor that sold and installed insulation containing asbestos says it has been dismissed from 10,900 cases. “At the present pace, the so-called backlog should be cleared in the next two to three years,” it told the court in January.
The trust, set up to resolve asbestos claims against the long-defunct contractor, is a defendant in many of the lawsuits. It contends that the dismissals show “it is now undeniable” that the majority of the cases are not viable.
The dismissals are painful and frustrating for people like Cynthia Molineiro of Pasadena, who waited years for a day in court.
Molineiro’s father, Edgar Wooten, worked at Bethlehem Steel. He died in 2005 — more than a decade after he first filed suit. Molineiro, who has childhood memories of her mother shaking particles off her father’s clothes when he got home from work, said she got a letter last year from the Angelos firm saying the case was being dismissed.
“These people knew it was toxic to the workers,” Molineiro said of the defendants in such lawsuits. She’s unhappy that her father’s case has ended in this way.
The backlog was not simply a function of cases languishing in an overburdened court system, but because one of several defendants — insulation contractor Wallace & Gale Co. — was mired in bankruptcy proceedings.
Lawyers on both sides declined to comment for this article.
But in court, the Angelos firm, now being managed by Peter Angelos’ son, Louis Angelos, disputed that the cases it is dismissing were never viable.
“As cases are set in, we are looking at those, again speaking with clients in cases that may not be as significant, or clients who have received a certain amount of compensation and don’t wish to proceed further, or clients who are now the grandchildren of clients … and are vetting those cases again as they come up to reduce what needs to go forward … to reduce the amount of judicial resources necessary in cases that may not necessarily warrant them,” Armand Volta, an attorney for the firm, said at a July court hearing.
The Angelos firm hasn’t given up on finding a way to consolidate its cases. While The Baltimore Sun was reporting this story, its attorneys sent a letter to the court Jan. 5 saying they were engaging in “global settlement discussions,” and asking for the court’s help.
“Focused or targeted consolidations, where appropriate and consistent with precedent, are an effective tool towards the resolution of cases,” the attorneys wrote. “We believe the Court can and should play an integral role in assisting with ongoing settlement discussions in order to advance the likelihood of resolution of these cases.”
Consolidation was part of an asbestos litigation strategy that helped Peter Angelos win more than a billion dollars’ worth of settlements in the early 1990s.
But in more recent rulings in cases involving asbestos and cigarette lawsuits, the courts have sharply limited consolidation as an option. Defendants — who include manufacturers and suppliers of asbestos, as well as contractors that used it — argued that consolidation undermines their right to have judges or juries weigh each case on its merits.
Asbestos, commonly used as an insulation material throughout the 20th century, has been linked to many types of cancer and lung diseases.
Thousands of workers in Maryland have brought legal cases after being exposed through their work in shipyards and steel mills, as well as at churches, school buildings and commercial properties.
The dropped lawsuits don’t mean the claims have been abandoned. The cases are instead being referred to a bankruptcy court, where they could still be resolved, but at a fraction of the amount.
Part of the reason the cases have remained in limbo for so many years was that Wallace & Gale was going through bankruptcy from 1984 until 2002, when the settlement trust was established. Many of the cases involve multiple defendants, meaning pending claims were already paid by co-defendants. Wallace & Gale’s status kept its part of the claims alive.
Many of the plaintiffs have since died.
The Wallace & Gale trust said in July that it had participated in 4,533 status conferences and been granted dismissals in 3,405 cases — or 75% of the cases called to date at that time. It said it had settled 232 of the cases: a ratio of 22 dismissals for every settlement.
Ted Roberts, an attorney for the trust, told judges that the process has “shined the light on what these cases are and are not, and … the entire dynamic of the program has changed now.”
The trust remained a defendant in 26,000 cases at the time.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs have complained that the backlog stems in part from not enough judges to hear the cases. Circuit Judge W. Michel Pierson, who is retired but continues to oversee the docket, has said the court has enough judges for trials, but cases are dismissed before they reach that stage.
“We have 500 trial slots this year that nobody is using,” Pierson told legislators.
To be sure, some trials have continued. The Angelos firm took an Anne Arundel County man’s case to trial in 2017 and won a $14 million jury verdict that was reduced to $7 million and upheld by the appellate courts. The man’s claims dated to the early 1970s. The suit alleged he contracted mesothelioma, a type of cancer associated with asbestos, after being exposed to insulation products that Wallace & Gale installed during the construction of Loch Raven High School.
To help address the backlog of other cases, the Angelos firm pushed to create an office — the Office of Asbestos Case Mediation and Resolution — that would have offered an alternative resolution option.
Judiciary leaders, including Maryland Court of Appeals Chief Judge Mary Ellen Barbera, objected, arguing that judges have an appropriate system to review cases and hold trials.
The congregation was in the middle of an online service when a longtime churchgoer in her 60s texted her pastor to complain that his prayer lamenting the riot the U.S. Capitol in January was “too political.”
The woman later unloaded a barrage of conspiracy theories. The election of Joe Biden was a fraud. The insurrection was instigated by Black Lives Matter and antifa activists disguised as Donald Trump supporters. The FBI was in on it all. The day would soon come, she said, “when all the evil, the corruption would come to light and the truth would be revealed.”
Startled and moved to tears, Pastor David Rice told the woman she had been “tricked by lies.”
“You need to know how crazy this is,” he said to his congregant at the Markey Church in Roscommon County, Michigan, a rural region of 25,000 residents that voted 2-to-1 for Trump. “You have been with my family and in my home and I care for you but you are dabbling in darkness. You are telling me it’s giving you hope. I’m telling you as your pastor that it’s evil.”
The two haven’t spoken since.
Details emerging from investigations into hundreds of Capitol rioters have cast an unsettling light on the toxic roles that fringe religious beliefs and QAnon conspiracy theories have played in shaking big and small churches across the nation. Trump’s false insistence that he won the 2020 election may have incited the mob, but it also pointed to a dangerous intersection of God and politics.
A Kentucky man who the FBI charged as the first to enter the Capitol through a broken window saw himself as fighting a holy war on behalf of his president and, in a booking photo, wore a T-shirt that quoted Ephesians 6:11: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.”
Jacob Chansley, the shirtless man dubbed the “QAnon Shaman” for his distinctive fur hat, horns and American flag face paint, said a prayer from the vice president’s U.S. Senate dais, thanking the “Heavenly Father” for “allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government.”
In photos from the Capitol on Jan. 6, religion abounds: “Jesus 2020” and “Proud American Christian” banners, a flag with an ichthys, or “Jesus fish,” and a man in a jacket advertising the Knights of Columbus Catholic fraternity among
them.
For pastors like Rice, whose church members were hundreds of miles away from Washington, D.C., and by and large abhorred the attacks, the lawlessness that day has spurred them to speak out against the rising tide of misinformation and Christian nationalism that they, too, have seen gripping their congregations and evangelical life in the U.S.
“Something disturbing has happened with evangelicals in this country where we have become prone to conspiracies and believing the worst about our enemies, where we end up placing the Republican Party and ourselves as Americans first before true Christianity,” said Rice, 39, who has pastored the Baptist church for six years and doesn’t identify with either major party.
His fears are matched by recent data.
In a February report from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think
tank, more than a quarter of white evangelicals said the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which a cabal of powerful politicians run a global child sex trafficking ring, was “mostly” or “completely” accurate. The number was the highest of any religious group. The same survey found that 3 in 5 white evangelicals believe Biden’s win was “not legitimate.” A poll released this year from Nashville, Tennessee-based Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, found that 49% of Protestant pastors said they often hear congregants repeating conspiracies about national events.
The trends led a group of more than 500 influential evangelical pastors, thinkers and faith leaders to recently publish an open letter condemning “radicalized Christian nationalism” and the “rise of violent acts by radicalized extremists using the name of Christ.” Signers of the letter, called “Say No
To Christian Nationalism,” included Jerushah Duford, the granddaughter of the late Rev. Billy Graham, and the Rev. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, a prominent progressive Christian advocacy organization.
The spread of disinformation isn’t exclusive to religious groups and is widely seen as a larger casualty of the internet. In the last year, Facebook and Twitter have cracked down on QAnon-related accounts and appended fact checks to posts on COVID-19 and the presidential election. Conservatives and free speech supporters have said the social media companies have gone too far in canceling Trump’s accounts for their role in the insurrection.
Yet, because Christianity is the largest faith in the U.S., “it’s key to look at churches and pastors as spaces where people organize and spread their ideas,” said Andrew Whitehead, an Indiana University-Purdue University sociologist and co-author of “Taking America Back For God.”
Whitehead studies the growth of Christian nationalism, which he described as “the fusing of Christianity with the belief that we are a Christian nation, one that God has chosen specifically for success and a particular Christian path, one that has been tied to the Republican Party and being white.” This joining of politics and faith “has been influential for decades but was given a much bigger megaphone by Trump,” he said. “We’ve seen that those who embrace Christian nationalism are also more likely to believe in conspiracies.”
In interviews, pastors said houses of worship were particularly susceptible. But this new brand of identity politics has tested the power of the preacher against extremist voices in the pews. A Sunday morning can veer from the poetry of the Sermon on the Mount to the latest on Telegram.
For some pastors, church climates in the last year have become too much to bear.
Vern Swieringa, a Christian Reformed Church pastor, quit his post in the small western Michigan village of Hamilton in December after months of disputes with his congregation over his request to require masks.
“That was the biggest part of it but there was so much more,” said Swieringa, 61. “There were elderly members of my congregation that would share videos with me saying that Democrats were going to turn this country to socialism, that they were evil and QAnon was right. I tried to say with love that these were conspiracies and they would thank me but I’m not sure if it worked.”
Swieringa recently got a new part-time job pastoring at Kibbie Christian Reformed Church in South Haven, Michigan, where masks are mandatory.
The national rush to vaccinate teachers in hopes of soon reopening pandemic-shuttered schools is running into one basic problem: Almost no one knows how many are getting the shots, or refusing to get them.
States and many districts have not been keeping track of school employee vaccinations, even as the U.S. prioritizes teachers nationwide. Vaccines are not required for educators to return to school buildings, but the absence of data complicates efforts to address parents’ concerns about health risk levels and some teachers unions’ calls for widespread vaccinations as a condition of reopening schools.
The number of school staff members receiving vaccinations — and refusal rates — are unclear in several large districts where teachers were prioritized, including Las Vegas, Chicago and Louisville, Kentucky.
Some state agencies and districts have said privacy concerns prevent them from tracking or publishing teacher vaccination data. Others say vaccine administration sites are not tracking recipients’ occupations.
In Oregon, where teachers began receiving vaccines in January, the state Health Authority can’t say for sure how many have been vaccinated because the agency does not track the profession of recipients. Portland Public Schools, the state’s largest district where learning remains largely remote, is not keeping track either as it works toward launching a hybrid model for elementary schools by April.
No states are publicly reporting the percentage
of teachers and school staff that have been vaccinated, according to a Johns Hopkins University analysis published Thursday.
Education leaders are missing out on an opportunity to address hesitancy about when it’s safe to go back, said Megan Collins, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions. Increased transparency could influence back-toschool decision making, she said, and would likely make teachers and students more willing to return to classrooms.
“We’re seeing a substantial disconnect. There are states not prioritizing teachers for vaccine that are fully open for in-person instruction, and others that are prioritizing teachers for vaccines, but aren’t open at all,” Collins said. “If states are going to use teacher vaccinations as a part of the process for safely
returning to classrooms, it’s very important then to be able to communicate that information so people know that teachers are actually getting vaccines.”
Over a dozen states had yet to prioritize teachers for vaccines before President Joe Biden directed all state governments this week to administer at least one coronavirus vaccination to every teacher, school employee and child-care worker by the end of March. Biden has promised to have most K-8 schools open for classroom instruction by the end of April.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not include vaccinating teachers in its guidelines for schools to consider when to bring students back to classrooms. But vaccines have been a sticking point in reopening debates.
A push for statewide vaccine data is under way in at least one state, New
York, where Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would direct districts to report weekly how many staff members have been vaccinated. The more teachers that have been vaccinated, he said, the better others will feel about returning to classrooms.
Los Angeles Unified School District, the secondlargest in the country after New York City, lets teachers register for vaccine appointments offered by the school system through an app designed with Microsoft. But district spokesperson Shannon Huber said the district is not tracking who has gotten vaccinated. A reopening date for Los Angeles schools is still undetermined and depends in part on all school staff being offered vaccines, a demand of the district’s teachers union.
At Jefferson County Public Schools, the Kentucky district including Louisville,
all staff wanting to receive COVID-19 vaccines got shots in arms by mid-February, and the district is now gearing up to reopen schools. A district spokesperson said vaccination figures were not available.
Vaccinations are not mandated in Kentucky, but Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear does require vaccinated teachers who were working remotely to return to their school buildings whenever in-person classes resume. Exceptions can be made with an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or if the employee qualifies as a highrisk employee. Beshear has called for districts statewide to reopen.
Vaccines were a contentious part of the fight to reopen schools in Chicago, which narrowly avoided a teachers strike last month over COVID-19. Vaccinations began in mid-February, but it’s unknown how many of the nearly 40,000 Chicago Public Schools employees have been vaccinated.
Chicago school system officials say they have some data from appointments that were allocated to school staffers, but medical privacy laws limit their ability to publicize a firm count. A plan that recently cleared the school board will require school employees to disclose their vaccination status and, eventually, require vaccinations.
Even after vaccines are widely available to teachers, that may not be enough to leave behind distance learning.
In Philadelphia, where schools are preparing to launch hybrid learning for students in PreK-2, a dispute with the teachers union over the state of school infrastructure has remained a stumbling block in returning to in-person instruction.
In Detroit, teacher distrust in health care has made the district slow to reopen, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said. With a community population that is 78% Black, the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 have sowed fear about receiving the vaccine, as well as a reluctance from teachers to inform the district that they’ve been inoculated.
Though $750 in hazard pay is being offered to teachers as an incentive to return to school buildings, Vitti said Detroit will need different outreach from other school districts to encourage vaccinations and in-person returns.
“Based on what the majority is doing — the majority in this case being white suburban rural districts coming back — the understanding is, ‘Well, everyone’s back, why wouldn’t we be back?’ ” Vitti said. “There needs to be a differentiated, unique intentionality about the communication and effort to bring back our students and other students like ours throughout the country.”