Maine Landmark Legal Settlements
Blueberry lawsuit settled
Wild blueberries are big business in Maine. The state produces 25 percent of all blueberries in North America, making it the largest blueberry producer in the world.
This lucrative business was rocked when a multimillion-dollar price-fixing lawsuit pitted the state’s blueberry growers against the three largest blueberry processors.
In a 2004 settlement, the processors, Cherryfield Foods, Wyman's and Merrill's, agreed to pay the state’s growers more than $4 million. The sides reached a settlement after a $56 million judgment against the processors was overturned by the state’s Supreme Court.
Settlement reached in "Dateline NBC" lawsuit
In 2000 a legal battle between Maine truckers and the national television magazine show Dateline NBC that raised questions about journalistic ethics ended in a settlement.
The trucker, Peter Kennedy of Holden, and his employer, Ray Veilleux, owner of Classic Carriers in Waterville, Maine, had filed a defamation suit against the program, claiming that NBC misrepresented itself by saying it planned a positive story in 1995 about the trucking industry.
The case was settled after a Boston appeals court reversed a Maine jury's 1998 defamation verdict in favor of the trucker and threw out the $525,000 in damages.
At the time the trucking industry was coming under scrutiny for several fatal accidents that were blamed on tired truckers. The "Dateline NBC" program stemmed from a crash in which a rig driven by a Pennsylvania trucker who falsified his logbook veered into the breakdown lane of the Maine Turnpike and killed four teenagers in a parked car.
President Jimmy Carter signs the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act
In 1980 President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act. The legislation called for an $81.5 million settlement that ended a long legal battle over American Indian claims to nearly two-thirds of the land in the state of Maine.
The settlement resolved claims by the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes to more than 12.5 million acres in northern and eastern Maine. The tribes had argued that the land belonged to them because Congress had never ratified the treaties under which the Indians lost their land.
In return for giving up their claims to the land and up to $25 billion in damages, the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies each received a $13.5 million trust fund and $26.6 million for purchase of 150,000 acres in the state's unorganized territories. The Houlton band of Maliseets got $900,000 to buy 5,000 acres.
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