James Stone was disturbed by the things he had seen while working at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, including overflowing hazardous waste “lagoons” and a plan to stabilize toxic wastes by mixing them with cement.
The engineer took 2,300 pages of documents to the FBI in 1987 and was a driving force behind the agency’s raid of the plant, which ultimately resulted in defense contractor Rockwell International pleading guilty to 10 environmental crimes and paying $18.5 million in fines.
A 6-2 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday that cut him out of sharing in $4.2 million in civil penalties assessed against Rockwell is an affront to the legacy of the 82-year-old, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, whose career was ruined by his decision to step forward. But more than that, the court’s strict definition of who is an “original source,” a prerequisite to bringing a federal whistleblower lawsuit, could discourage others from calling attention to government waste and fraud.
“Fewer whistleblowers are going to come forward to take action,” predicted James Moorman, president of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a non-profit that guides whistleblowers and lawyers.
The False Claims Act is a tool that has been used to recover billions stolen by government contractors. It includes a provision that allows citizens who know of fraud to sue contractors on behalf of the government. The citizen, who must have original knowledge of fraud, as opposed to, say, reading about it in the newspaper, can share in any funds recovered.
In 1999, Stone won a $4.2 million judgment against the contractor. He had sued along with the federal government to recover environmental cleanup costs and bonuses paid to Rockwell. As part of the lawsuit, he produced a 1982 order he had written in which he explained how mixing toxins in cement to create solid blocks “would result in an unstable mixture that would later deteriorate and cause unwanted release of toxic wastes to the environment.” The so-called pondcrete blocks ultimately caused significant pollution at the site northwest of Denver.
After 18 years of legal wrangling in several different courts, the Supreme Court decided that Stone’s prediction that the plan to mix toxins with cement would fail wasn’t the same as knowing it had. The justices also took issue with Stone’s explanation of how the failure would occur, which wasn’t exact.
The decision is a sad final note to what was, by all accounts, an honorable course of action by a man with the best intentions. Congress should revisit this law to ensure that whistleblowers like Stone are treated more fairly in the future.
