By RUSS OLIVO

PROVIDENCE — The Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed a landmark verdict against three former lead paint producers Tuesday, dealing a major blow to Woonsocket, Pawtucket, Central Falls and other communities that want the companies to rid the brain-damaging heavy metal from hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings.

The unanimous decision obliterated the lone victory to date against the lead paint industry.
A jury found Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries Inc. and Millennium Holdings LLC liable in 2006 for creating a public nuisance by manufacturing and selling a toxic product.
The state had proposed that the companies spend an estimated $2.4 billion to inspect and clean hundreds of thousands of homes built before 1980 that it said were likely to contain lead paint.
The court, in its 4-0 decision, said the state's lawsuit should have been dismissed at the outset.
It said that while lead paint was a public health problem in Rhode Island, it wasn't the companies' responsibility to clean it up because they had no control over how the paint was used.
“Our hearts go out to those children whose lives forever have been changed by the poisonous presence of lead,” Chief Justice Frank Williams wrote in the opinion. “But, however grave the problem of lead poisoning is in Rhode Island, public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm.”
A lawyer for Sherwin-Williams called the ruling a “victory for common sense.”
“This case never should have been filed,” said Charles H. Moellenberg, Jr. “It was factually wrong and legally flawed. A company should not be held liable when there is no proof that it did anything wrong.”
Shares of Sherwin-Williams rose 2.4 percent to $47.01 and shares of NL Industries rose 5 cents to $9.58.
Roberta Hazen Aaronson, executive director of the Childhood Lead Action Project, said she was “profoundly disappointed” by the court's opinion and that the industry had been totally absent from dealing with lead paint contamination.
“Once again, corporate power trumps social justice,” she said.
Hazen Aarsonson said the ruling stops dead a fledgling plan to distribute the judgment to communities where lead paint is a prevalent hazard to infants and children.
“You’re talking about most of Woonsocket,” she said. “Any home built before 1978, unless it’s been totally renovated, probably would have been a candidate for this project.”
Attorney General Patrick Lynch defended his office’s handling of the lawsuit.
“Despite the multi-million dollar lead industry-funded defense waged by an army of more than 100 lawyers, my office proved to the satisfaction of a unanimous jury that the three defendants were liable for the public nuisance that their products created in Rhode Island,” Lynch said in a statement. “I believed then, believe now, and will always believe, that our peers got it right.”
Calling the ruling “legally and fundamentally wrong,” Lynch said his office had poured more resources into the lead paint suit than any other in history - and the losers are the children who live in homes tainted with the residue of lead paint. Those products continue to poison infants and children while bringing great profits to the companies that made and sold them, he said.
“Today, the Supreme Court ruled that these defendants do not have to clean up the mess they have made,” Lynch said. “This reversal is enormously disappointing, and I disagree with it in the strongest terms.”
 Rhode Island was the first state to sue over the harms of lead paint, which studies have shown can cause brain damage, coma and even death in children exposed to flaking paint chips or dust. The state's lawsuit, filed in 1999, targeted former makers of lead pigment, which had long been used in paint to make it more durable.
The first trial ended in 2002 with a hung jury.
The case went to trial again in the fall of 2005. The jury ruled against three manufacturers and absolved a fourth, Atlantic Richfield Co. It was the only court case the lead paint industry had lost.
Though lead-based paint was banned from residential use in the U.S. in 1978, lawyers for the state say it has poisoned tens of thousands of children since the early 1990s in Rhode Island, where a large percentage of homes were built before the ban took effect. They said lead paint remains in an estimated 240,000 properties.
The state said the companies continued manufacturing and selling lead-based paint even though they knew it was unsafe. It said that unlike property owners, landlords and taxpayers, the companies have done nothing to deal with the problem.
The companies argued that the number of lead-poisoned children was steadily declining and that landlords and property owners who allowed their properties to deteriorate were more to blame. They said the state never presented any evidence that their products were used in any Rhode Island home or had even been sold in the state.
The state's cleanup plan would have required the companies to remove or permanently enclose lead paint from homes built before 1980, two years after lead paint was banned, as well as elementary schools, playgrounds and child care centers. The state said its proposal would have taken four years and involved 10,000 workers.
There have been efforts around the country to sue lead paint makers, but so far no other case has been successful.
Several suits are still pending, including in Ohio and California. The top courts in New Jersey and Missouri last year rejected public nuisance lawsuits against the companies, while a jury in Milwaukee in June ruled in favor of NL Industries in a suit brought by the city.
Ohio is the only other state that has sued. Jim Gravelle, a spokesman for that state's attorney general's office, said lawyers in the office were interested in what the Supreme Court said because the arguments in both cases are very similar. But he said it does not affect Ohio's lawsuit because that suit is based on Ohio law.
“This in no way restricts Ohio's right to hold lead paint companies liable for the extreme harm they have caused Ohio citizens under public nuisance or other causes of action,” he said.
The court did, however, hand Lynch one court victory, setting aside contempt sanctions and fines totaling $15,000 for comments the attorney general made during and after the trial.
Lynch was fined on two separate occasions, once after being quoted during the trial as describing the companies as “those who would spin and twist the facts” and another for saying after the verdict the companies could not “duck and run” from their obligations to deal with lead paint problems.
With Associated Press reports.