PIKEVILLE, Ky. — A company suing Pikeville attorney Glenn Martin Hammond and two other lawyers has filed an emergency motion with the court, seeking to prevent evidence from being hidden or destroyed.
The 3M Company filed a racketeering lawsuit last month against Hammond, Texas attorney Michael B. Martin, and Mississippi lawyer Johnny Givens last month, alleging that they worked together to file fraudulent and frivolous product liability lawsuits against the company on behalf of coal miners afflicted with black lung. The company accuses the attorneys of exploiting miners into making false statements about using dust masks made by 3M, even though the company says “very few coal workers ever wore dust masks while working in the mines.”
After the complaint was filed, Hammond released a statement saying the lawsuit was “a transparent and desperate attempt to intimidate our firm” and to put an end to his work on behalf of coal miners.
But now 3M claims Hammond has taken steps toward hiding or destroying evidence in the case. The company claims Hammond ordered an employee to move dozens of bankers boxes of evidence to a storage unit on Bypass Road in Pikeville.
“3M has a reasonable and good faith basis to believe that, absent a Court order, Hammond will destroy these original case files or secret them away to a new location to prevent their disclosure through discovery in this case,” the motion says. “To start, Hammond has already taken steps to hide these case files in the storage locker. Now that their location is known to 3M — and by virtue of this motion it will be known to Defendants that 3M knows — the next logical step to ensure they can never be used against Defendants in this litigation would be to destroy them or hide them elsewhere. The mere fact that Hammond hid them in the first instance is proof positive of the lengths he will go to hide evidence and avoid accountability for his wrongdoing.”
The motion says a standard preservation order would not provide enough protection and asks that the court order the records to be turned over to a third-party custodian.
Hammond responded to a request for comment by Mountain Top News by saying that the timing of the motion is suspect. Hammond said trial dates were set yesterday in hundreds of product liability cases against 3M, and the company filed a motion alleging wrongdoing by him the very next day in an attempt to sway public opinion about those cases.
“This is just another ongoing indication of the tactics 3M will use to taint the jury pool and suppress potential jury verdicts for severely injured coal miners and their families from the defective masks that they knew about and hid,” Hammond said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
The judge has agreed to allow 3M to deliver subpoenas for the records to Hammond and the storage rental company and has scheduled a hearing Thursday in London to further discuss the matter.
A copy of the motion and the judge’s order is reprinted below:
