Jerome Facher Lawyer Who Artfully Won Case for Polluter Dies at 93
Jerome Facher in 1998 on the set of the movie "A Ceremonious Action." / David James/ Touchstone Pictures
Jerome Facher, a lawyer who successfully dedicated a Woburn tannery accused of h2o pollution that plaintiffs linked to a cluster of babyhood leukemia deaths — a example that became the basis of a all-time-selling volume and a Hollywood flick — died on Sept. 19 at his home in East Arlington. He was 93.
His death was confirmed past his daughter Gillian Facher, The New York Times reported.
The instance, recounted in Jonathan Harr's book A Civil Action (1995) and in a 1998 picture show by the same name, centered on a liability suit filed in 1982 by viii families in Woburn. The families defendant the tannery'due south parent company, the Chicago conglomerate Beatrice Foods, and the chemic company W.R. Grace, which had a manufacturing plant nearby, of dumping toxic chemicals that from the 1950s to the '70s had seeped into the neighborhood's groundwater.
Ferocious litigator
Mr. Facher (pronounced fasher) was on retainer to Beatrice, his biggest corporate customer, which had recruited him because of his reputation as a ferocious litigator. By the early on 1980s, he had tried some 60 cases and lost very few, The Times reported.
Simply Mr. Facher feared that Beatrice would exist doomed in the Woburn litigation if the families testified in court about their disturbing struggles with the cancer and other ailments that affected every bit many as a dozen neighborhood children, who had been exposed to water from two contaminated city wells. The wells were finally shut in 1979.
"Facher believed that this instance was one he could not win," Harr wrote, "not in front of a jury."
Beatrice decided to dangle a $4 one thousand thousand settlement offering. But Jan Schlichtmann, the plaintiffs' lawyer, believed he had a solid instance and refused to sell the families short. (In the moving-picture show, directed by Steven Zaillian, Mr. Facher was played past Robert Duvall and Schlichtmann by John Travolta.)
In mounting the company's defense, Mr. Facher combined stagecraft with cunning strategy, The Times obituary said.
Kept victims' families from testifying
He devised a maneuver to keep the victims' families from testifying by focusing the first phase of the trial on a scientific question: whether any of the poisons had actually migrated from the tannery to urban center wells. He underscored the fact that the xv-acre tannery site was separated from the city wells past a river. He subjected 1 proficient witness for the plaintiffs to half-dozen days of withering cross-exam and impugned the credibility of another, a geologist, for testifying that he had received his main'south degree in 1976, when he had said in a pretrial deposition that it was granted in 1979.
"I was told past my thesis committee and the geology department that I did accept my degree," the witness said.
"You were told?" Mr. Facher replied incredulously. "You're saying you lot had a verbal degree in 1976? Is that what you want the jury to believe? Practice y'all know of whatever academy in the earth that grants oral degrees?"
Throughout the trial, Mr. Facher disrupted his adversary's courtroom momentum by repeatedly interrupting him with objections.
Demanding
Mr. Facher could be merely as fell out of the courtroom. In A Civil Activity, Harr described him as "at in one case humble and self-effacing, only also tyrannical and demanding to his acolytes."
He recalled Mr. Facher writing in the margins of a brief drafted by a young lawyer, "Is English your starting time language?" and asking a student at Harvard, where he taught law: "What are you going to do adjacent? Requite up? Make a living selling cheeseburgers?"
His tactics, however harsh, frequently succeeded. In July 1986, after a 78-day trial, the jury absolved Beatrice of liability. That meant that in the next phase of the trial, in which the families were likely to bear witness, Beatrice would no longer be a defendant.
Later the trial, a separate investigation by the federal Environmental Protection Agency plant that both Beatrice and Grace had been complicit in the mortiferous pollution and socked them with a $68 million bill to decontaminate the sites. The agency ended that toxic chemicals had leeched into an aquifer that fed the city wells, the source of the neighborhood's drinking water.
Armed with the new findings from the bureau and other evidence, Schlichtmann tried to revive the case against Beatrice. He was unsuccessful.
Schlichtmann, who after became an ecology lawyer, recalled Mr. Facher as "fiercely devoted to his client" and "the nearly formidable lawyer I always went up against."
Groundwork
Jerome Paul Facher was born on Dec. 9, 1925, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Morris and Gussie (Levy) Facher. His mother endemic a dress shop, and his father sold various sorts of merchandise — from pots and pans to encyclopedias — door to door.
The younger Mr. Facher studied chemistry at Bucknell Academy Inferior Higher (at present Wilkes University), simply transferred to what is now Penn State University and graduated in 1946 with a caste in journalism.
After enlisting in the Army and serving in the Korean War, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he felt inadequate compared with his classmates, many of whom had been Ivy League undergraduates, Harr wrote.
He nevertheless became an editor of The Harvard Police force Review and graduated magna cum laude in 1951.
After graduating, Mr. Facher returned to the Army to join its legal arm and served with the American delegation to NATO before returning to Boston in 1955. He then joined the firm Unhurt & Dorr in Boston, where he became chairman of the litigation department. (One colleague in the department was Joseph Due north. Welch, who had been chief counsel for the Army and had famously defied Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954 with his "have you lot left no sense of decency?" challenge; another was James D. St. Clair, who became chief counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal.) Mr. Facher remained with the house until he retired in 2013.
He married Vivien C. Gattie. In addition to his daughter Gillian, she survives him, equally does some other daughter, Marise Facher, and a granddaughter.
Harr, who had been a reporter for The New England Monthly, wrote A Civil Activeness after he embedded himself with the plaintiffs' lawyers. His research included attending Mr. Facher'due south trial-practice class at Harvard Law for two years. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Laurels.
Random legal quirks
"By the cease, A Civil Activeness shows that the bounty the Woburn families received was adamant mainly past random legal quirks and the personalities of the lawyers and judges involved," Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
"The book leaves ane wondering," Easterbrook asked: "Is this whatever manner for club to settle its disputes?"
After four decades of practicing police force, Mr. Facher also expressed reservations about the efficacy and fairness of the judicial system.
"The truth?" Harr quoted him as saying. "The truth is at the bottom of a bottomless pit."
Services at Beth El Temple Eye, two Concord Avenue, Belmont, were held Sept. 24. Burying followed at Beit Olam Cemetery, Wayland.
This news obituary was published Friday, Oct. 4, 2019.
Source: https://www.yourarlington.com/arlington-archives/residents/people/current/16168-facher-100419.html
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