UM Grace Case

The four remaining lead defense attorneys claimed to have rested their case Tuesday morning, but their stipulations prompted Judge Donald Molloy to recess the jury for a brief hearing. When the jury came back into the courtroom, Molloy said the case could go before them Wednesday.
After resting its case, the defense moved to admit [...]

Attorneys representing Robert Bettacchi called several witnesses Tuesday morning in order to discuss the export plant that W.R. Grace & Co. donated to the city of Libby, and Mel Parker’s purchase of the screening plant from Grace.
Thomas Frongillo, representing Robert Bettacchi, said that Parker was called to testify again because additional information had surfaced [...]

Defense attorney David Bernick spent the morning using his cross-examination of Robert Locke to argue that publication of W.R. Grace’s hamster study was unnecessary. It merely corroborated existing studies that showed tremolite to cause cancer in laboratory animals, he said.
Similar studies, such as the Johns-Manville study, which Locke said he knew about, had been [...]

After abruptly excusing the jury on Monday because one juror was ill, Judge Donald Molloy took a moment first thing Tuesday to verbally check on the jurors’ well-being. Hearing all was well, direct examination of former W.R. Grace employee Robert Locke resumed where it had left off Monday.
Attorneys for the government began by asking Locke [...]

The last two defense attorneys finished their cross-examination of former Grace financial analyst James Becker on Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kris McLean made his redirect, and the government called another witness to the stand to wrap up the morning.
Defense attorneys Stephen Spivack and Thomas Frongillo quickly established that Becker had nothing to say about their [...]

The laptop ran out of battery before the voir dire process even began, and without an electrical plug, I moved to the courthouse’s designated media room where supposedly a live-video stream from the courtroom would be fed.
But the cameras are trained on an empty witness stand and an empty podium, and aside from a potential juror’s head [...]

Good morning. Alex Tenenbaum is in the federal courthouse in Missoula for UM’s Grace Case Project as the long awaited trial of U.S. v WR Grace gets underway. The 80 potential jurors started the day in the courtroom with court officials only, watching, we are told, a standard-procedure instructional video on the jury selection [...]