Bad Houses - RI Lead Paint Trial

"Public health is a profession hard to explain to your parents," quipped Patricia Nolan when plaintiff lawyer Neil Kelly asked her to explain her former position at the Rhode Island Department of Health.  It was one of the few light moments in the Rhode Island lead paint trial, which grinds on Monday.

An expert witness for the plaintiff in the landmark Rhode Island lead paint trial, Dr. Nolan headed the Department of Health for ten years, until recently.  She made a mission of screening for, reducing and preventing elevated levels of lead in the blood of as she said at the trial, "our kids."

Dr. Nolan, both a medical doctor and with a degree in public health, came to the Rhode Island position from similar jobs in Colorado and Arizona.  Out there in the West housing is newer.  Therefore, Dr. Nolan testified, she hadn't experienced much of a lead paint public health problem in the West and was "stunned" when she grasped how massive a menace it was in a state which had been one of the original 13 colonies.

To make a long mission short, Dr. Nolan was described earlier in the trial as being responsible for real progress on this problem.  We will certainly see the data regarding this on slides tomorrow, the tenth day of the trial.

As a former law student (Harvard Law School), a person with an emotional stake (I was a paint-chewer in the 1950s) and citizen journalist trying to make sense of this confusing trial for my readers and perhaps other media, I am coming to some tentative conclusions about this landmark case.

First, an apologia.  I went into this saying I was reserving judgment.  That morphed into perceiving (strongly) that maybe the state didn't have a strong case or one that the jurors should be giving up four months and some change of their lives to decide.

Some readers of this blog have questioned why I went from neutral observer to someone with a position.  My answer:  Let them sit in Court Room 11 for nine days and not sort of get it that this is not the issue the state of Rhode Island should be pursuing.  Maybe at one time, such as ten years ago when Dr. Nolan came East, it was that kind of issue.  But so much of this problem has been resolved.

Okay, the tentatives:

• Bad Houses.  Maybe this is what this case will go down as in history.  About half of one percent of the 250,000 properties with lead paint figure into the lion's share of new cases of elevated lead blood levels in children.  It's not an oversimplification to conclude, hey this is about Bad Houses, isn't it.

• Targeting.  Instead of creating a whole lot of new paraphernalia to address the lead paint situation in Rhode Island, maybe just maybe the common sense approach is to do something about those bad houses.

• Enforcing current law.  In effect already is the Lead Hazard Mitigation Law.  If it were vigilantly enforced for those bad houses, the problem of lead paint might become as distant a memory as polio has become.  (In the 1950s, at least in Jersey City, NJ, every kid's summer was shaped by the agita about "catching polio.")

• Creating a new law so this kind of issue never morphs into a court case again.

Side Note:  A weighty issue.  As yet, I have no visual or other documented insights about problems of putting on the pounds during the first nine days of this trial for the jurors, attorneys for both sides and Judge Michael Silverstein.  We sit.  We sit. What I do know is my slacks are tight.  Over the long weekend I stocked up on low-carb South Beach bars for breakfast and lunch.   

 

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