DuPont faces first trial over Benlate

The first racketeering trial over the fungicide Benlate began yesterday with a loss for the DuPont Co. when the judge ruled that jurors will be told of secret Costa Rican testing and the destruction of evidence about it.DuPont ordered a halt to Benlate production in April, after 32 years. The order came after the company paid out more than $1 billion in settlements and legal fees on growers’ claims that the chemical destroyed their crops.Two Costa Rican growers are suing the world’s largest chemical maker for at least $20 million in compensatory damages over crop losses dating back to 1990, plus unlimited punitive damages.In a pretrial ruling, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Amy Steele Donner decided to tell the six-member jury at the end of the case that DuPont conducted tests in Costa Rica in 1992 and destroyed records that it had a legal duty to preserve as claims mounted.Benlate was temporarily recalled in 1991 after growers complained of yellow and deformed leaves and root damage from the systemic chemical.After U.S. testing in 1992, “DuPont reached the conclusion, the inescapable biological conclusion that Benlate could not be the cause of the damage,” company attorney John Boudet said in his opening statement.The company attributed the problem to a one-time herbicide contamination at a Benlate mixing plant and stopped paying growers’ claims. But complaints of crop damage continued long afterward.The growers’ first witness, Pennsylvania State University plant pathologist Winnard Hock, reviewed DuPont documents since 1980 describing Benlate as an unstable product prone to deterioration in hot, moist conditions.Some plants treated with Benlate grew to only 10 percent of their expected height, miniature roses studied in Florida in 1994 and 1995 dropped all of their leaves within two days of Benlate treatment, and Hawaiian orchid flowers treated with Benlate grew too distorted to sell, Hock testified.