LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge in Los Angeles is hearing arguments about whether to nullify a $2 million award to six men who claimed their work on a banana plantation in Nicaragua made them sterile.
Dole Food Co. wants to overturn the award a Los Angeles jury made in 2007. The case involves fraud in a similar case that the judge, Victoria Chaney, threw out last year.
On Thursday, an attorney for the men, Steve Condie, argued in Los Angeles Superior Court that Dole deliberately withheld from the trial evidence of fraud that company investigators had uncovered.
But Dole attorney Theodore Boutrous says Dole only had suspicions — not admissible evidence.
In throwing out a related case last year, Chaney found that many of the plaintiffs never picked bananas and weren't sterile.
