State & Region News

His client died in January, but an Alabama attorney this week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide when those who believe toxins made them sick can sue the chemical’s makers.

Robert Palmer, an attorney with Environmental Litigation Group in Birmingham, represented Jack Cline until his death earlier this year. Cline said he used benzene to clean equipment from 1979 to 1987 at Griffin Wheel Co. in Bessemer. In 1999, he was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, a fatal cancer of the bone marrow that has been linked to benzene exposure.

A Jefferson County circuit judge and the Alabama Supreme Court barred Cline from suing Ashland Inc., Chevron Chemical Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp., which manufactured the benzene he used.

The courts said the state’s statute of limitations allowed two years from the time of the last exposure to file such a claim.

Legal precedent also states that a plaintiff can’t sue unless he or she is sick, but the plaintiff also can’t sue if he or she becomes ill more than two years after the last exposure to the chemical.

The rulings “ensure that it is almost always too soon or too late for a toxic tort victim to file a lawsuit,” Palmer said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has no timeline for deciding whether to hear Palmer’s appeal.

“I’ve been told it’s a long shot,” he said. “Ordinary people deserve fairness. Jack Cline was denied that fundamental process.”

In the brief filed in Washington this week, Palmer and Leslie Brueckner, his co-counsel from the nonprofit group Public Justice, ask the high court to take up the case because “the decision … perpetuates an injustice that both the Alabama Supreme Court and the Alabama Legislature have refused to address.”

Bills that would overturn the “last exposure” standard have been proposed in the Legislature the past three years but languished in committee.

In the state Supreme Court, Palmer met opposition from the Business Council of Alabama. BCA attorneys wrote that “such judicial activism in this case is inappropriate.”

They also wrote that such a shift in standards would “have economic impacts on the ability of employers to invest in their current employees — both in terms of current wages and retirement plans.”

Palmer said he expects to meet resistance from business groups again.

“They’re going to be very interested in curtailing the rights of individuals,” he said. “We never even got the opportunity to present the case of whether the exposure caused his disease. I believe in justice, and I’m not going to give up while it’s in my capacity.”