The Tangipahoa Parish’s sheriff has dropped a class action lawsuit he filed against China on behalf of sheriff’s departments across the nation that have suffered serious financial hits due to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic
Chief Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana granted a motion by Sheriff Daniel Edwards to dismiss the litigation on Feb. 8. Defendants in the case were the People’s Republic of China, the nation’s National Health Commission, the government of the city of Wuhan and other agencies.
According to the original complaint filed last May, Edwards’ department sustained damages estimated at $700,000 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, including loss of revenues from reduced court fees and property taxes and increased costs due to the need for personal protective equipment, sanitizing efforts, and the testing of employees and prisoners.
Don Massey of Couhig Partners LLC, the lead attorney in the litigation, said Edwards fully recognized the challenges of suing the nation where the virus originated, since the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act generally restricts the filing of litigation against foreign governments in U.S. courts.
“Our efforts to serve them took approximately nine months, and service was refused on each of the defendants by the People’s Republic of China with the specific statement that it would infringe on the People’s Republic of China’s sovereign immunity,” Massey told the Louisiana Record.
At the time of the filing, however, Congress was considering legislation to make such lawsuits easier to advance, he said.
“Those (proposals) would have expanded the ability to bring those lawsuits in the U.S.,” Massey said, “and neither of those bills moved forward.”
The final straw seemed to come earlier this month when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Federal Republic of Germany could not be sued in American courts by the heirs of Jewish art dealers during the Nazi era who were forced to sell valuable medieval religious works of art. The circumstances in that case did not meet the exceptions to allow such litigation to proceed, as outlined in the Sovereign Immunities Act, the justices ruled.
“That case certainly solidified the sheriff’s thinking, and certainly our thinking, that the objection by the People’s Republic of China was sufficient in our view to probably make it beyond extremely difficult to pursue our case at this time,” Massey said.
The lawsuit noted that there was significant public evidence that the coronavirus may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory. But it also left open the possibility that it originated in an exotic seafood market in the region. Either way, China’s authorities failed to take proper precautions to keep the deadly virus from spreading beyond its borders, according to the complaint.