(Transcript from today’s proceedings)
After a break in testimony Monday due to a sick juror, cancer victim Edwin Hardeman is slated to take the stand today in the ongoing Roundup cancer trial in federal court in San Francisco. His testimony is expected to take less than an hour.
Judge Chhabria indicated the trial will proceed today without the woman juror if she remains ill. Only six jurors are required for the case to move forward and currently there are seven.
For Hardeman’s direct examination, his attorneys plan to bring in to court a 2-gallon, pump-up sprayer to demonstrate how he applied Roundup to his property for years; how his repeated exposure actually occurred. Monsanto attorneys on Monday sought to nix the sprayer demonstration plan, arguing that it would “invite the jury to make any sort of speculation about how the use of the sprayer could have influenced exposure…” but Chhabria sided with Hardeman’s lawyers, saying he would allow a brief demonstration with the sprayer. He even made a bit of a joke:
THE COURT: I mean, one helpful bit of guidance I can provide now is that the Plaintiffs are not allowed to spray you with the sprayer.
MS. MATTHEWS (Monsanto attorney): Okay.
THE COURT: And they are definitely not allowed to spray me with the sprayer.
In another move applauded by Hardeman’s legal team, Chhabria said Monday that testimony about the “Parry report” can be presented to jurors. Monsanto objected but the judge agreed with plaintiff’s counsel that “the door has been opened to the Parry report” by Monsanto’s efforts to contest evidence of genotoxicity with glyphosate herbicides. Dr. James Parry was a consultant hired by Monsanto in the 1990s to weigh in on genotoxicity concerns being raised at the time by outside scientists. Parry’s report recommended that Monsanto do additional studies to “clarify the potential genotoxic activity” of glyphosate.
See this snippet from Monday’s discussion of this topic:
THE COURT: Okay. Well, Monsanto has a report from a doctor
that it hired that — that raised concerns about the
genotoxicity of glyphosate. So it seems to me that you are — you have already said something to the jury — even before we get to your second
point, you have already said something to the jury that is contradicted to a degree by an internal Monsanto document. And so why shouldn’t they be able to cast doubt on Monsanto’s assertion to the jury that genotox doesn’t matter bye stablishing that Monsanto hired a doctor to — or hired an
expert to look at the issue of genotoxicity in the late ’90s and the expert raised concerns about genotoxicity? … I mean, Monsanto itself investigated genotox – hired somebody to investigate genotox, and that person concluded that genotox — that it’s possibly genotoxic.
After Hardeman’s testimony, next up with be expert witness Dennis Weisenburger, professor of the Pathology Department of the City of Hope Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
