MILLOY: Federal Judge Overturns EPA Human Experiments Case

By Steve Milloy, Wednesday, February 13, 2013

It’s a good thing the U.S Public Health Service called off the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments in 1972. Had someone sued to stop the horror, a federal judge like Anthony Trenga might have stopped the suit — not the experiments.

That’s precisely what Judge Trenga did on Jan. 31 in the case of the American Tradition Institute v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The American Tradition Institute sued the EPA in October to stop an ongoing experiment in which the agency was exposing elderly study subjects (up to 75 years of age) to concentrated levels of a deadly (according to EPA) air pollutant known as PM2.5 (soot or dust much smaller than the width of a human hair).

The lawsuit claimed the experiments were illegal in that they blatantly violated virtually every major standard developed since World War II for the protection of human study subjects used in scientific experiments.


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The Environmental Protection Agency has been subjecting elderly Americans and others to what the agency itself calls deadly substances. So a group sued them to put an end to the practice. Oh well, it was worth a try. A federal judge decided to shut down the lawsuit rather than the government’s human experimentation program.

To Judge Trenga, however, the important thing apparently was to nitpick to death the effort to stop the experiments with a narrow reading of the federal rules of civil procedure.

Judge Trenga determined that the EPA’s decision to endanger the lives of its study subjects, including inducing them to sign a fraudulent consent form, did not constitute a “final agency action” under the Administrative Procedures Act. Judge Trenga also determined, as the American Tradition Institute was not being harmed by the experiments, it didn’t have standing to pursue the case.

Presumably Judge Trenga might have allowed an actual human study subject to maintain a lawsuit to stop the experiments, but then again, how would they? The EPA lied to each of them about the risks of the experiment.

Lifetime-appointed and thus unaccountable Judge Trenga essentially decided, in agreement with Department of Justice and EPA pleadings, that no one and no law can stop the EPA from breaking the sacrosanct rules protecting human subjects from rogue experimentation. His ruling came even though federal rules of civil procedure explicitly state they “must be construed so as to do justice.”

Thanks to Judge Trenga, EPA (and possibly any other rogue government human experimenter) now has a “get out of the Nuremberg Code free” card.

Read the whole thing. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) requested hearings to look into this matter in October, but of course Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) hasn’t done a thing about it. What’s that about Democrats caring about people?

http://lonelyconservative.com/2013/02/fe...Conservative%29

Lisa Jackson's son has asthma. The woman is a ghoul.