A pair of sweeping lawsuits filed by attorney Peter G. Angelos that sought to hold some of America's best-known paint makers liable for injuries caused by old lead-based paint have all but died in the city's Circuit Court.

The lawsuits accused the manufacturers three years ago of conspiring during the 1940s and 1950s to cover up the dangers of their products, which have been linked to brain dysfunction in children.

But Judge Joseph P. McCurdy Jr. ruled that "voluminous" documents produced by the Angelos firm to prove that the companies acted together to suppress information about the hazards of lead paint "fail to raise any material facts supporting a conspiracy."

"Quite to the contrary," McCurdy held in an opinion published Nov. 15, the companies paid major U.S. universities to research the toxicity of their paint in the 1950s so they could "give the most accurate information to the consumer public" about the potential hazards and safe use of their products.

The conspiracy allegation was at the heart of two lawsuits that Angelos filed in 1999, and it remains a central issue in dozens of lawsuits nationwide.

Rhode Island, San Francisco, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., several counties in California and Texas, school districts in Texas and Mississippi, the New York City Housing Authority and scores of individual plaintiffs have sued the industry.

The Rhode Island lawsuit recently ended in a hung jury, with state officials vowing to reassert their claims in a new lawsuit.

If proved, the conspiracy claim could make manufacturers jointly liable for billions of dollars in cleanup and special-education costs and personal injuries, whether or not plaintiffs can prove which company made the paint that harmed them -- which is difficult to document in most cases.

Hundreds of Baltimore children are exposed to the toxin every year. Most are African-American toddlers living in the city's slum rental wards, but dozens of middle-class children are also affected, usually through improper renovations and home-handyman projects that release lead paint dust into their homes.

In the first Angelos suit, he sought $15 million in damages for each of six children diagnosed with mental and behavioral disorders linked to their exposure to lead paint dust and chips in Baltimore homes.

Higher burden of proof

The ruling Nov. 15 effectively quashed the claims of one of the plaintiffs -- a 9-year-old East Baltimore boy poisoned in a rental house in 1995.

It also means the remaining plaintiffs must now meet the almost-impossible burden of proving which company made the toxic paint that poisoned them.

Ron Richardson, an attorney for the Angelos firm, said he would "have no comment while the litigation is pending," adding that the plaintiffs were considering whether to appeal the judge's ruling.

Case dismissed

A second suit Angelos filed against the paint companies on behalf of about 1 million Maryland homeowners alleged that lead paint has reduced their property values and sought millions of dollars in cleanup costs.

That case was dismissed by McCurdy in December on grounds that even if Angelos could prove that the paint companies lied about the safety of their products, the lawyer had failed to show that the homeowners had relied on the false advertising when they bought their houses.

In fact, McCurdy found, the hazards of deteriorating lead paint have been well publicized and widely known to the general public for decades -- and that Maryland law requires each homeowner to prove that he or she was duped by the companies into believing lead paint was safe.

Banned by Congress in 1978, lead paint had been largely withdrawn from the market by major manufacturers after a series of research studies in the 1950s revealed that old chips and dust could inhibit normal brain development in children.

"No-strings-attached research was, in fact, funded by the industry," said Chuck Moellenberg, an attorney for Sherwin-Williams Co. and the designated spokesman for several other paint makers in the suit.

"And by 1955, the industry, in fact, recommended ... that lead paint no longer be used in the interiors of dwellings and that warning labels be placed on paint cans about the hazard to kids.

"Contrary to the picture portrayed in these suits, there is a long history of responsible industry conduct here."

Labels disputed

Angelos sought to defeat this line of reasoning by arguing that the companies also had a duty to apply labels to their lead-free products warning consumers that it could be dangerous to sand, scrape or chip older paints before applying the new coating.

McCurdy rejected this argument, saying:

"Under Maryland law, defendants have no duty to warn of the hazards of using another manufacturer's product."