(CN) — A panel of judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took just three weeks to issue an order affirming a lower court’s ruling in favor of BP as part of a 2019 lawsuit filed by former oil spill workers who claimed to develop chronic sinusitis as a result of inhaling chemicals during the Deepwater Horizon clean-up.
In an opinion written by Chief U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor, the panel found the lower court did not abuse its discretion by excluding the testimony of expert witnesses regarding general causation of the worker’s illnesses. Pryor noted that all toxic tort actions are grounded in scientific methodologies and expert evidence, but those involving chemicals not known to be toxic require a higher burden of proof.
Because the medical community does not widely accept that “oil, dispersants, or any chemicals associated with them” can cause common conditions like chronic sinusitis, plaintiffs Lester Jenkins and Dwight Siples needed to prove both general and specific causation. The case is considered one of two bellwether cases in thousands of so-called Back End Litigation Option cases resulting from the 2010 BP oil spill.
The lower court — the Northern District of Florida — found experts representing the plaintiffs failed to identify harmful levels of exposure to oil, dispersants or other chemicals, while they also failed to make a “statistically significant association” between the chronic conditions and exposure to crude oil, among other flaws.
In Friday’s opinion, Pryor wrote that the exclusion of the experts’ testimony represented “no reversible error” by the lower court and otherwise characterized its order as “meticulous and well-reasoned.” Pryor also cited similar decisions from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Under the abuse of discretion standard, a district court’s decision must be “manifestly erroneous” by misapplying the law, making a clearly erroneous finding of fact or failing to follow proper procedures.
“The district court did not abuse its discretion when it required the experts to identify a ‘toxin’ and prove it ‘[was] harmful above a particular threshold’ and excluded them because they failed to do so,” Pryor, an appointee of George W. Bush, wrote. “Instead, it applied general-causation principles drawn directly from our precedents, aligned with those of other circuits, and consistent with the reasoning of every other decision in Deepwater Horizon backend-litigation suits. This holding is hardly the kind of misapplication of precedent that chalks up to error, much less a manifest one.”
At oral arguments September 26, plaintiffs’ attorney Shea T. Moxon claimed general causation requires a lower bar of evidence than specific causation. But Pryor wrote that although a “threshold dose of a toxin is relevant to specific causation,” general causation demands “whether a harmful level of the toxin exists in the first place.”
Pryor added that the panel’s findings “easily survive our abuse of discretion review” and found that the lower court correctly excluded testimony from experts who “failed to support their opinions with epidemiology, dose-response relationship, or background risk of disease.”
“Even setting the threshold dose aside, the district court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded their testimony and granted summary judgment to BP,” Pryor concluded.
In addition to Pryor, the panel included U.S. Circuit Judges Robert Luck, an appointee of Donald Trump, and Ed Carnes, an appointee of George H.W. Bush.
Back End Litigation Option cases were available to class members who were diagnosed with a qualifying health condition after April 15, 2021. In order to succeed, the plaintiff must provide that his or her health condition was caused by exposure to substances released in the spill, or decontaminants and dispersants used to clean it up.