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Monsanto’s six week trial which began June 22 with jury selection in San Francisco Superior Court has been a parade of mostly dark days for the chemical titan.
Tuesday, July 31, was a relatively bright oasis for Monsanto and by far its best showing so far in the dramatic Read More
"Instead of putting American families first, the Trump administration is once again doing the bidding of corporations and their lobbyists."
President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Transportation Department on Wednesday formally unveiled their long-anticipated plan to gut Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, a regulatory rollback environmentalists quickly denounced as "a disastrous wreck for consumers and the planet."Read More
Fifty years ago, in their popular hit “Chicago,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young asked Americans to take notice of a federal courtroom in the Windy City, where a black political activist sat bound, gagged and shackled to a chair in a legal drama where America’s justice system, values and character seemed to all be on trial.
Today, the most outspoken member of that band, Neil Young, visited another American courtroom. This one in San Francisco, where the essential values and future of our country once again are on trial. Young and his fellow activist Daryl Hannah Read More
Following the close of our case, Monsanto’s lawyers, on July 30, made an obligatory motion to nonsuit the case—a Hail Mary motion asking the judge to dismiss our claims on grounds that Plaintiff’s counsel, during the past six weeks, had not produced sufficient evidence to bring the case before the jury.
Judge Suzanne Ramos Bolanos denied the motion on all issues except our request Read More
On Friday morning, July 27, day 13 of the Monsanto trial, we called our final live witness in Dewayne Johnson’s case against Monsanto—Dr. Charles Benbrook. Benbrook is an agricultural and toxicology scientist. A Harvard graduate and former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences, Benbrook has been studying the link between Read More
Wednesday, July 25—Day 11 of the Monsanto trial—seemed a dark day for the Plaintiff.
With the jury off duty, Judge Bolanos heard a parade of evidentiary motions and made a series of surprising and disappointing rulings in Monsanto’s favor for each one.
First, Plaintiff’s counsel lead by Brent Wisner, sought to exclude evidence that our side’s exposure expert, Dr. William Sawyer, occasionally used Roundup himself. Wisner and his colleague, Tim Litzenburg, Read More
The New York State Assembly has put forth a bill than bans BPA substitution chemicals in children's products. The bill, which has been referred to the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, would expand existing legislation that prohibits the sale of child care products that contain bisphenol-A.Read More
On Tuesday, July 24, the Johnson vs. Monsanto trial resumed with video testimony from Monsanto’s toxicologist, Donna Farmer, who leads the chemical company’s deceptively named Product Safety Center, and who has been a lifelong nemesis of environmental, safe food and farming advocates.
It wasn’t easy getting Farmer’s videotaped testimony. Here’s the backstory. When our legal team sent a process server to Farmer’s home in St. Louis, to subpoena her testimony, Farmer was observed fleeing through a backyard fence. We had the block staked out and successfully served the summons. But to Read More
On Monday morning, July 23, the jury in Johnson vs. Monsanto heard testimony from Dr. Ope Ofodile, the Plaintiff Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s dermatologist. Dr. Ofodile described beginning her treatment of Lee in 2014, shortly after Lee was diagnosed with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Her affection for Lee and her passionate devotion to his treatment was evidenced throughout her surprisingly moving testimony; she even wrote to Lee’s employer, the Benicia District School Board, on Lee’s behalf and “ Read More
The biotech industry has long insisted that genetic engineering is no different than, or at the very least a continuum, of traditional plant breeding techniques—a myth perpetuated by the industry to shield it from public criticism, as well as from regulatory oversight.
But a new study from the biotech industry itself admits that there are in fact significant differences between new methods of genetic engineering, including the gene-editing technique CRISPR, and conventional plant breeding, further dispelling the claim that the two methods are one in the same. Read More
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