Florida Personal Injury Lawyers Debate Country of Origin for Compensation Purposes

Back in 2007, Louisiana jurors awarded $3.3 million in compensatory damages to six Nicaraguan plantation workers who had sued Dow Chemical Company and Dole Fresh Fruit Company seeking compensation for alleged health problems caused by the pesticide

Dibromochloropropane (DBCP). One of the other defendants, American Vanguard, settled out of court before the jury returned its verdict.  All in all the jury determined that Dole should pay the bulk of the compensatory damages. The jury also found that six other plaintiffs in the case were not injured by exposure to this particular pesticide.

A Boca Raton personal injury lawyer makes a good point when he says, “this lawsuit raises a broader judicial question regarding which circumstances trigger a personal injury suit to be tried in a country where the defendants are based instead of where the injury occurred.”  For example, thousands of banana plantation workers have filed personal injury lawsuits in the United States; however the banana plantations where the presumed injuries occurred are all in another country.  The Louisiana pesticide case was the first of its kind in the first of five slated to go to trial in the United States where the injured parties came from other countries.

According to a Florida personal injury attorney, in the case of the Nicaraguan plantation workers, DBCP was banned in the United States back in 1977.  The plaintiff claimed that Dow and American Vanguard knew of DBCP’s toxicity decades before it was phased out; however these companies disputed this claim and herein lays the basis for the entire personal injury claim against these companies.

Many Florida personal injury lawyers debate whether or not a personal injury case involving something like the above pesticide/plantation should be turned away from the United States courts because they are overloaded and the original injury did not happen on American soil. Other attorneys believe the United States should help in these types of personal injury cases because many of the people seeking monetary damages come from extremely poor countries in which no help is available.