The ruling by U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster clears the way for testimony at a bellwether trial by Russell Portenoy. "The court concludes Dr. Portenoy's testimony is too important to the [bellwether] trial, and that exclusion of his testimony is too extreme a sanction under these circumstances," Judge Polster wrote in rejecting sanctions that a special master approved earlier this month. "We are glad Judge Polster understood the need for the public to hear Dr. Portenoy's admissions that what Purdue and he did was wrong and it led to this epidemic," Hunter Shkolnik of Napoli Shkolnik PLLC, a top plaintiffs' lawyer in the MDL, told Law360. Download