DuPont Tangles With a Judge Who's Used to Famous Disputes : Courts: From a Georgia bench, J. Robert Elliott has ruled in civil rights and corporate battles. He is again demonstrating the ability to infuriate.

By MARC RICE

June 30, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

COLUMBUS, Ga. — When J. Robert Elliott was appointed a federal judge in 1962, a fellow jurist warned that Elliott was about to make a lot of people mad.

From blocking a march by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to imprisoning protesters at a controversial military school, Elliott has certainly done that. Now he’s 85, and a case involving one of the world’s most powerful corporations has again demonstrated Elliott’s ability to infuriate.

The judge has himself become an issue as DuPont fights charges in his court of withholding evidence during a 1993 trial. In that lawsuit, plant growers charged that the DuPont fungicide Benelate ruined their crops.

The chemical maker has complained repeatedly of unfair treatment by Elliott, who has stung the company both orally and in written orders over its conduct in court.

A sampling: When a DuPont lawyer indicated there were exceptions to documents that Elliott required the company to furnish, the judge sternly clarified his order. “A-double-L,” he said. “I think I wanted to make it so clear that you were to produce everything.”

Elliott fined DuPont $1 million--later erased as part of the settlement that ended the trial--and also ordered company CEO Edgar Woolard to court to explain why DuPont was dragging its feet over supplying certain pieces of evidence.

After the 1993 settlement, Woolard appeared to look forward to other pending trials over the fungicide, noting “we expect to have a more balanced environment.”

But the company is back before Elliott. The growers have charged that DuPont withheld other evidence that came to light in a separate trial involving Benelate. They are seeking sanctions against the company.

DuPont has tried to have Elliott removed from the case, questioning his impartiality and suggesting he gave the growers’ attorneys inside information before the settlement.

DuPont officials declined to comment on Elliott. The judge is reviewing the growers’ charges and did not indicate when he would rule.

The pipe-smoking octogenarian, who avidly tends his lawn at home and plays tennis once a week, would not discuss the DuPont case, although he insisted he treats everyone fairly.

In his office, under a portrait of Robert E. Lee, the nation’s oldest active district judge emphasized that he keeps control over his courtroom and doesn’t shy away from bold actions.

“A judge who has been on the bench a long time has had a lot of cases to make people unhappy,” Elliott said. “You just presume you’re going to be criticized one way or another, and usually you’re not disappointed.

“The high profile adds some zest to the experience. I don’t look for them, but I don’t run from them.”

Former Columbus, Ga., Mayor Frank Martin, a lawyer who has argued many cases before Elliott and who has observed some of the DuPont proceedings, defended the judge’s fairness but said Elliott is not one to be trifled with.

“When the judge tells you to do something, you do it,” Martin said. “They [DuPont] acted like they were hard of hearing.”

Martin recalled a time when he was 30 minutes late to court. The judge, surprisingly, did not admonish him.

“He didn’t have to. He gave me a look which encouraged me to never let that happen again,” Martin said. “And it has not.”

Joseph Wiley, attorney for the Columbus branch of the NAACP, said he has been frustrated repeatedly in Elliott’s court.

“He has been pretty consistent in that civil rights plaintiffs have not fared well. That’s not to say he’s unfair,” Wiley said.

“He does what is right according to his accumulation of experience, but the result of that has not been favorable in civil rights,” Wiley said.

Civil rights thrust Elliott into the national limelight, a place to which the son of a north Georgia Methodist minister has frequently returned.

One of his first acts as judge was to stop King from leading a march in Albany, which earned him a place in history books as a temporary obstacle to the civil rights movement.

“I couldn’t have been appointed at a worse time,” Elliott recalled. “It was an explosive situation, and I jumped right into the middle of it.”

Elliott said he has no regrets about that case, although an appeals court ruled he exceeded his authority. Racial tension in Albany then was high, he said.

“What I did, I think, had the effect of cooling that situation off and probably resulted in averting a real serious situation,” Elliott said. “I did what I thought should have been done at the time and I’m not concerned about how people evaluate it.”

Elliott was back in the news when he overturned Lt. William Calley’s first-degree murder conviction in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Calley, who had spent three years under house arrest, was freed. But his conviction was later reinstated by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a notorious murder case, the 1973 slayings of six members of the Alday family, Elliott refused to reverse the convictions of the three killers. They argued that pretrial publicity had made it impossible for them to receive a fair trial. Elliott said the evidence against them outweighed the impact of publicity, a position later rejected by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

More recently, attorneys for three men sent to prison for protests at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning told the U.S. Supreme Court that Elliott was “very hostile, very biased and very demeaning” at their trial. The Supreme Court let the convictions stand, ruling that judges have considerable leeway in their remarks.