Photo: Haven Daley / Associated Press
An Alameda County judge on Thursday upheld a jury’s verdict that Monsanto’s widely used Roundup herbicide caused cancer in a Livermore couple, but reduced their damages from $2 billion to $86.7 million.
Evidence at the Oakland trial, though disputed, supports the jury’s conclusion that Roundup was “a substantial factor” in causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in both Alva and Alberta Pilliod, said Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith. She said the evidence also supported the jury’s finding that Monsanto had known the herbicide’s active ingredient, glyphosate, could be dangerous while the Pilliods were still using it and had failed to warn them.
Further, Smith said, there was clear evidence that Monsanto, after learning of the dangers, “made efforts to impede, discourage or distort scientific inquiry” by regulators who approved its use, “reprehensible” conduct that justifies punitive damages.
But she said the punitive damages in this case, $1 billion to each plaintiff, were much higher than the constitutional limits set by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court has said that those damages, intended to punish and deter misconduct, generally should be no more than four times the amount of damages awarded to compensate victims for their losses.
After reducing the Pilliods’ compensation for economic losses and pain and suffering from about $55 million to a little over $17 million, Smith set punitive damages at four times that amount, $69.4 million. The couple had anticipated the reduction, and their lawyer said the overall ruling was “a major victory.”
Although “the reduction in damages does not fairly capture the pain and suffering experienced by Alva and Alberta,” attorney Brent Wisner said in a statement, “the judge rejected every argument Monsanto raised and sustained a very substantial verdict.”
Monsanto’s parent company, the German pharmaceutical firm Bayer AG, said it would appeal.
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The reduction in damages is “a step in the right direction,” the company said in a statement, but the verdict and damages “conflict with the extensive body of reliable science and conclusions of leading health regulators worldwide” that both Roundup and glyphosate are safe.
Alva Pilliod, 77, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a sometimes-fatal form of lymph cancer, in 2011, and Alberta Pilliod, 74, was diagnosed in 2015. They had used Roundup for more than 30 years to kill weeds on three properties they owned in the area, spraying it once a week for nine months out of the year. Doctors say their cancers are in remission but could recur.