In his final statements at today session, Judge Borrello announced he had a scheduling conflict with another trial (30 year old murder case) on January 27, 2003 and felt it would be best for both sides to reschedule the Class Action certification trial until February 24, 2003 at 9:30 A.M..  The Judge stated he will keep 2-3 days open for the Dow case and hoped to issue a verdict by March 1, 2003.

Today's session was held at Dow's request so that they could complain about not receiving plaintiff records even though the court set deadline is December 1, 2003.   Dow stated they had not received any plaintiff records, plaintiff lawyer countered Dow was sent 1861 pages last Friday and would be sending another 1000 pages on Monday December 1.    The plaintiff attorney, Jan Helder,  stated that all of the records requested by Dow have no relevance to Class Action certification (he successfully defeated Dow's requests for Medical Records at this juncture).  He also stated that if Dow was really concerned  about a lack of time, they should have started depositions back on November 7th when the court authorized them to do so. 

The Judge listened to both sides with little comment before he went into chambers. Upon returning he brought up his 30-year-old murder trial and stated it would probably interfere with the Dow case scheduled for 1/27/04. During his statement, not once did he bring up either sides accusations or defenses about the lack of records. Instead, he stated that realistically, the hearing should be delayed because if he left it scheduled for 1/27/04, it would more than likely be cancelled at the last minute due to the murder trial. He then went on to say that the proposed schedule in Dow's motion for delay would fit with his murder case schedule and therefore asked both parties to abide by it. The lack of records was not mentioned by the Judge as the reason for delay as one would believe by reading news media accounts of the hearing

TRW

For additional articles like this one, go to the Tittabawasse River Watch web site www.trwnews.net for complete coverage of the Tittabawassee River Dow Chemical dioxin contamination saga. . The Newspaper / Media page of our site contains an extensive archive of media articles dating back to January 2002. The source organization's web site link is listed to the right of the article, visit often for other news in our area. The Newspaper / Media page may be accessed by scrolling down to the bottom of the CONTENTS section and clicking on the Newspaper/Media link.