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| Plaintiffs protest Thursday in front of the federal building in Anniston. Photo: Bill Wilson/The Anniston Star |
Black marker on white sheets of poster board was the medium for their brief slogans: "No Justice, No Peace," "Equal Rights + Justice."
"Though few we are, we’re making a voice," said Rose Munford.
The message was to Judge U.W. Clemon and plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Tolbert PCB case as they met with the group of plaintiffs appointed to advise the claims administrator, Ed Gentle.
Brenda Crook, a lead plaintiff in the Tolbert PCB case, said the plaintiffs’ attorneys have been telling her to stay out of the news, but she is not afraid.
Early Thursday morning, she arrived at the courthouse with her minister and prayed on the ground where she would later march.
"When you mess with God’s children, you know what’s going to happen," she said. "God is going to be all around this courthouse this morning."
Though only members of the advisory group attended the closed meeting, it invoked resistance from both the handful of plaintiffs who have been speaking out against the way the case was handled and from the executive director of Community Against Pollution, David Baker.
Baker went to the meeting, only to be told by Clemon that he could not sit in because he is not a member of the advisory board. Baker and CAP were instrumental in getting the lawsuit started, but he is not a plaintiff in the Tolbert case.
After the meeting, he released a statement saying CAP no longer would be involved in any aspects of the lawsuit and that all questions about the case should be directed to Gentle.
"Our phone’s ringing every day with people asking us about something we know nothing about," Baker said.
He said he wants to know why Clemon did not permit Shirley Baker of CAP, his wife, who is a plaintiff in the Tolbert case, to be part of the advisory group.
"I don’t understand why he’s ignoring CAP’s responsibility to this community," Baker said.
Gentle said he and Clemon thought it best to get fresh eyes on the committee. Shirley Baker was already active in the community on PCB issues.
Gentle said he hopes to continue receiving input from David and Shirley Baker because they have been a great help.
Beverly Carmichael, a committee chairperson who has spoken out against the settlement as unfair, said the meeting with Clemon was productive.
The committee had requested that Clemon come and listen to their concerns, and that is what he did, she said.
The protesters said they objected to Clemon and attorneys coming in for a private meeting instead of coming to talk to the people.
In recent months, plaintiffs in the Tolbert case have reacted in frustration and anger to the fact that the federal case, with more than 18,000 plaintiffs, settled for $300 million — the same amount awarded to 3,500 plaintiffs in the state case. Their general consensus is that the lawyers settled for too little, and took too much — $120 million — for themselves in attorneys’ fees.
Munford in March sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft requesting an investigation into how the case was handled.
"The only thing it has done now is add more sorrow and pain," she said of the settlement.
Beverly Walker said people in western Anniston are sick and dying every day, but the court and the lawyers don’t care.
"I feel like they haven’t done any of us right in the community," Walker said.
She and her husband, Johny Walker, have four children who are not included in the court’s records as plaintiffs, even though they say they signed them up for the suit.
"I know you can’t call this justice," Johny Walker said.
Munford’s oldest daughter is also missing from the case, she said.
Gentle said he has received inquiries from about 2,000 people who say they are claimants in the Tolbert lawsuit, even though the attorneys have no record of them.
He is sending out a letter notifying those people who are not in the case, giving them 30 days to explain in writing or with documentation why they believe they are claimants.
The information will be forwarded to the appropriate plaintiffs’ attorney’s office, which will have 21 days to respond.
Ivy Handy’s mother had ovarian cancer. Her daughter has attention deficit disorder, and her late father suffered from diabetes, heart disease and a type of cancer she’s heard can be caused by PCBs.
Handy does not know which, if any, of the ailments were caused by PCBs, but she felt her family was owed something when she attended a meeting hosted by the Beasley Allen law firm three years ago.
Handy says she came with just her mother, because her father was too sick to leave the house. They filled out separate forms for themselves, for Handy’s father, and for her brother and her oldest daughter. She sealed them together in an envelope and dropped it in a box before they left the meeting.
Last weekend, Handy received a letter that said the attorneys’ records show she is not a plaintiff in the case.
"My mistake was when I first filled out that paperwork I should have made copies, but I never thought something like this would happen," Handy said.
Gentle will have the difficult task of deciding on each case as responses flood in. He said he would not set specific criteria. He will weigh the facts and circumstances for each individual.
On Oct. 29, 2001, thousands of people who attended the meeting flooded into the Anniston Entertainment Complex and a tent set up outside to absorb the overflow. Each person was handed a packet with an attorneys’ fee agreement and authorization forms. A lawyer with the Beasley Allen firm explained how to fill out the forms, and the potential plaintiffs were asked to turn in their packets at boxes by the doors when they left.
Their packets didn’t include copies of the forms for the people signing them to keep.
Mark Englehart, an attorney with the Beasley Allen firm, has a hard time believing any of the law firms involved could have "misplaced" paperwork.
"I would be very surprised if 2,000 people who came to that meeting and filled out forms properly and either left them at a designated spot or sent them to us were omitted from the case," he said. "I would be shocked."
He said the firm had a large staff dedicated to following up with all the people who did not fill out the forms properly. There was no shuffle or transfer of paperwork between the firms involved. The 12,812 claimants that his firm signed up during the meeting and during the months and years that followed have been their clients throughout the case, he said.
The only explanation he and the other lawyers have for the "missing" plaintiffs is that people who filled out an unrelated survey mistakenly thought they were signing up for the lawsuit.
"What we have found is that a number of people may have contacted the office at CAP, filled out a separate questionnaire that CAP had, gotten entered into CAP’s database, and assumed that made them part of the lawsuit," Englehart said.
Many people have said they signed up with Johnnie Cochran when he came to town in August of 2001. But Cochran was not asking people to take part in a lawsuit and hadn’t committed at the time to participating in the lawsuit.
"It’s possible that if someone showed up at that meeting and filled out a CAP survey they might have concluded they were signing up with Johnnie Cochran when they were not," Englehart said.
Baker said those are reasonable assumptions. He said some people didn’t fill out the right paperwork at the right times, or didn’t follow up with the attorneys. Others, he said, moved and didn’t let the attorneys know.
"Those that have legitimate complaints are the ones I’m concerned of," Baker said.