People v. Woosung America Corporation et al, San Mateo County Superior Consolidated Court Case No. 20-CIV-04471
On January 7, 2021, the San Mateo District Attorney filed a lawsuit against Woosung America Corporation (“Woosung”) and the company’s CEO. The suit claimed that Woosung was illegally wholesaling skate fish in San Mateo County. Unfortunately, the skate, a fish eaten all over the United States and the world, cannot be sold commercially in California. The State of California is unique in its protection of skate, and the reason is, in many ways the law of unintended consequences. California wanted to protect the apex predator of the seas, i.e., the shark, from slaughter for its fins. The state assembly passed a bill to protect sharks from slaughter. Along the way, the state senate inserted the word “elasmobranchii” to define shark. The state senate was correct in the sense that the oceans’ apex predator belongs to the subclass elasmobranchii, but elasmobranchii also includes rays, skates, and sawfish, certainly not the apex predators of the seas or the main ingredient in shark fin soup, which according to the legislation was a main cause of worldwide shark population decline.
Nearly every one of California’s District Attorneys will civilly and criminally prosecute possession and the sale of detached “shark fins,” the fins of the apex predator. The sale of skate fish, however, is usually foregone. This case was uniquely pursued by the San Mateo District Attorney. After a routine supermarket inspection at Kukje Market, Wardens of the state Department of Fish & Wildlife noticed the sale of skate fish. The Wardens tracked the skate fish to Woosung. And in turn, the San Mateo District Attorney wanted a civil penalty of $250,000 from Woosung for the wholesale sale of skate fish, which Woosung had purchased from a large seafood distributor in California.
Berliner Cohen immediately moved to consolidate the Woosung case with the Kukje case. The benefit to the defendants and the court was to prevent a piecemeal approach to the case and allow one judge to hear and decide the case. It also allowed us to show the overbearing and abusive approach to the case. The District Attorney wanted a civil penalty from Kukje of $200,000. Remember, you can find skate fish in nearly every specialty supermarket in the Bay Area.
Berliner Cohen’s litigation team also engaged an expert, a marine biologist, to establish the differences between sharks and skates. We forced the state to produce its witnesses from Fish & Wildlife for civil depositions. The case eventually went to trial (August 28-September 1, 2023). The court found a technical violation of the law; the detached tail of “elasmobranchii” includes the entire edible portion of the skate fish but the court found the penalty request to be abhorrent. Woosung was ordered to pay a penalty commiserate with the infraction. The penalty was $9,200 (or less than 4% of the District Attorney’s demand). The case also provided a precedent to other small businesses in San Mateo County because now small businesses can point to Woosung’s penalty as the starting point to resolve technical violations involving the skate fish (no more extortion based on a technical violation of a law that was aimed at protecting sharks, not skates).
The case represents that trial work has a goal of justice when the state seeks unreasonable awards. The Woosung case will likely cause the San Mateo District Attorney to follow the rest of the state’s district attorneys and prosecute the slaughter of sharks and not food consumption of skates.