Yandle
BENTON – U.S. District Judge Staci Yandle shut down a pelvic mesh suit, finding physician Pernankel Nayak of Effingham contradicted his earlier declaration at a deposition and stated he didn’t write it.
Yandle struck the declaration on May 4, credited Nayak’s deposition testimony, and granted summary judgment to defendants Johnson & Johnson and Ethicon.
Plaintiff Dianne Donaldson of Effingham County had asked Yandle to strike only the portions of the declaration Nayak disowned.
Michael Meyer of Effingham filed her suit in district court in 2015, claiming mesh from two devices in an implant eroded into her tissues.
Former district judge David Herndon transferred it to multi district proceedings before District Judge Joseph Goodwin of Charleston, West Virginia.
Tillery
BELLEVILLE – Stephen Tillery, ready for trial on a claim that weed killer paraquat caused four plaintiffs to suffer Parkinson’s disease, won the biggest judgment ever in an American trial and lost it at the Illinois Supreme Court.
In 2003, after a bench trial, late Madison County judge Nicholas Byron awarded more than $10 billion to a class of cigarette smokers Tillery represented.
The few American cases with higher judgments, such as state tobacco litigation in the 1990s and Deepwater Horizon explosion suits, ended in settlement.
Tillery retreated from the field of class actions after the state Supreme Court and Congress restricted them, though he has returned as ambitious as ever.
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