Quoted from http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202464446271
Order Tossing Expert Grabs Attention in Asbestos Case
Katheryn Hayes Tucker
Fulton County Daily Report
August 11, 2010
Orders from a middle Georgia judge throwing out an expert witness and the asbestos suit his testimony was going to support have defense attorneys celebrating and plaintiffs lawyers bearing down for an appellate battle.
At issue is a June 29 decision by Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge John Lee Parrott. He barred the testimony of John Maddox, a pathologist who claims that asbestos caused the lung disease that killed the plaintiff’s husband.
The problem, Parrott said, is the doctor’s opinion that any exposure to asbestos causes injury. That opinion, the judge said, “is not practically testable and has not been tested,” thereby violating one of the prongs of Georgia’s 2005 law governing the use of expert witnesses.
The law, based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1993 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals decision, 509 U.S. 579, says that expert witnesses may be barred from testifying if their theories or techniques cannot be tested.
“[T]he courtroom is not the place for scientific guesswork, even of the inspired sort,” Parrott wrote, quoting a 1996 decision from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Lawyers who defend companies from asbestos cases hailed Parrott’s decision as great news and predicted it could influence other judges around the state.
Lawyers for asbestos plaintiffs dismissed the ruling.
