Suit Puts Focus on Immigrant Workers' Rights
"Gloria Garcia Barragan, 52, boarded a plane for the first time this summer to travel from her home in southern Mexico to Decatur. She came to this industrial central Illinois town to testify in the wrongful death lawsuit concerning her son, who died in 2007 at age 26 of burns from an accident at the BioProducts plant of Archer Daniels Midland. ...The Garcias decided to put their faith in a local jury, declining Archer Daniel's $500,000 and a later offer of $1 million. On Sept. 11, a jury awarded the family $6.7 million, among the largest such judgments in state history for a childless man."
KARI LYDERSEN for the Washington Post.
[Lyderson was a Fellow in USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism 2009 Ethnic Media Fellowship, “Urban Environmental Justice: Reporting the Full Story.”]