PROVIDENCE, R.I. | The Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned a landmark verdict against three former lead paint producers Tuesday, a major setback for communities that want the companies to decontaminate hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings.
The unanimous decision reversed the lone victory to date against the lead paint industry.
A jury found Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries Inc. and Millennium Holdings LLC liable in 2006 for creating a public nuisance by manufacturing and selling a toxic product.
The state had proposed that the companies spend an estimated $2.4 billion to inspect and clean hundreds of thousands of homes built before 1980 that it said were likely to contain lead paint.
Attorney General Patrick Lynch said he was disheartened the case was over.
“We fought this, and we’re essentially at the end,” Mr. Lynch said. “Our fight now is, ’What do we do as a state to deal with the problem the lead companies have escaped from?’”
The court, in its 4-0 decision, said the state’s lawsuit should have been dismissed at the outset. It said that although lead paint was a public health problem in Rhode Island, it wasn’t the companies’ responsibility to clean it up because they had no control over how the paint was used.
“Our hearts go out to those children whose lives forever have been changed by the poisonous presence of lead,” Chief Justice Frank Williams wrote in the opinion. “But, however grave the problem of lead poisoning is in Rhode Island, public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm.”
An attorney for Sherwin-Williams called the ruling a “victory for common sense.”
“This case never should have been filed,” said Charles H. Moellenberg Jr. “It was factually wrong and legally flawed. A company should not be held liable when there is no proof that it did anything wrong.”
Shares of Sherwin-Williams rose 6.38 percent to $48.86, and shares of NL Industries rose 4.62 percent to $9.97.
Roberta Hazen Aaronson, executive director of the Childhood Lead Action Project, said that she was “profoundly disappointed” by the court’s opinion and that the industry had been totally absent from dealing with lead paint contamination.
“Once again, corporate power trumps social justice,” she said.
Jack McConnell, a lawyer for Rhode Island, warned that children would continue to be poisoned by lead because of the ruling and said homeowners whose properties are infected with lead-based paint now have no way to hold the companies responsible.
Rhode Island was the first state to sue over the harms of lead paint, which studies have shown can cause brain damage, coma and even death in children exposed to flaking paint chips or dust.
The state’s lawsuit, filed in 1999, targeted former makers of lead pigment, which had long been used in paint to make it more durable.
The first trial ended in 2002 with a hung jury.
The case went to trial again in the fall of 2005. The jury ruled against three manufacturers and absolved a fourth, Atlantic Richfield Co. It was the only court case the lead paint industry had lost.
Though lead-based paint was banned from residential use in the U.S. in 1978, lawyers for the state say it has poisoned tens of thousands of children since the early 1990s in Rhode Island, where a large percentage of homes were built before the ban took effect. They said lead paint remains in an estimated 240,000 properties.
The state said the companies continued manufacturing and selling lead-based paint even though they knew it was unsafe. It said that unlike property owners, landlords and taxpayers, the companies have done nothing to deal with the problem.
The companies argued that the number of lead-poisoned children was steadily declining and that landlords and property owners who allowed their properties to deteriorate were more to blame. They said the state never presented any evidence that their products were used in any Rhode Island home or had even been sold in the state.
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