Roundup Verdict Cut From $2 Billion to $86.7 Million
July 25 2019 - 8:53PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Randazzo
Bayer AG succeeded in getting a third large trial verdict
substantially reduced in litigation over the safety of its
signature weedkiller, Roundup.
A California state court judge in Alameda County on Thursday
trimmed a more than $2 billion award to $86.7 million in the case
of a local husband and wife who each blamed non-Hodgkin lymphoma
diagnoses on Bayer's product.
Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco reduced a more than
$80 million verdict to $25.3 million in the case of a Northern
California resident with similar allegations.
Bayer, which inherited the Roundup litigation when it bought
Monsanto Co. last year, has come under fire from investors after
losing three trials in California tying Roundup to cancer. Bayer is
now appealing or plans to appeal the verdicts, which have each been
lowered by the judges who oversaw the trials.
Lawsuits over the safety of Roundup and its active ingredient,
glyphosate, began cropping up after a 2015 determination by the
International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health
Organization unit, that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic to
humans."
Judge Winifred Smith denied a request by Bayer to completely
throw out the verdict in the case of Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a
married couple in their 70s who used Roundup on their San Francisco
Bay Area property for 35 years. The two were diagnosed with
non-Hodgkin lymphoma four years apart, in 2011 and 2015, and are
both in remission.
The judge found the evidence presented at trial supported the
jury's finding that Roundup caused the Pilliods to get cancer and
that Monsanto failed to warn about potential harms. She wrote that
"there is evidence that Monsanto had information that was not
available to the scientific or medical community and that it sought
to impede, discourage, or distort scientific inquiry and the
resulting science."
Brent Wisner, a lawyer for the Pilliods, called Thursday's order
a major victory for his clients, though "we believe the reduction
in damages does not fairly capture the pain and suffering
experienced by Alva and Alberta."
Bayer said Thursday the reduced verdict is "a step in the right
direction," but that the company continues to believe the verdict
and damages "are not supported by the evidence at trial and
conflict with the extensive body of reliable science and
conclusions of leading health regulators."
Judge Smith also denied a motion by Monsanto to find that
plaintiffs' lawyers committed misconduct during the trial, finding
that while "counsel for plaintiff did on occasion overstate matters
and violate the court's orders," it didn't result in a miscarriage
of justice.
The judge found the $1 billion each in punitive damages the jury
awarded to the Pilliods unconstitutionally high, and reduced the
awards to roughly four times the amount of other damages, which she
also cut down.
Several more Roundup trials are scheduled in the coming months,
including one slated to begin in August in St. Louis County, home
to much of the legacy Monsanto business.
Write to Sara Randazzo at sara.randazzo@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 25, 2019 21:38 ET (01:38 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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