A California judge on Oct. 22 reduced the damages awarded in a landmark lawsuit brought by California landscaper Dewayne Johnson against Monsanto Co. A jury in San Francisco’s Superior Court of California ruled on Aug. 10 (GM Aug. 17, p. 29) that Bayer AG, which recently acquired Monsanto for $66 billion, must pay $289 million in damages to Johnson, who alleged in a lawsuit that RoundUp herbicide caused his cancer.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Suzanne Ramos Bolanos on Oct. 22 reduced the punitive damages from $250 million to $39.25 million, however, and left the $39.25 million compensatory damages unchanged.
In her decision, Bolanos upheld the jury’s findings that Bayer acted with malice by failing to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by Roundup, but said punitive damages more than seven times as large as the compensatory award aren’t legally justified. Instead, she said that under constitutional law, the ratio should be 1-to-1.
The judge set a Dec. 7 deadline for the plaintiff to accept a total of $78.6 million. If Johnson rejects it, Bayer is entitled to a new trial on punitive damages, she said.
“Although we believe a reduction in punitive damages was unwarranted and we are weighing the options, we are pleased the court did not disturb the verdict,” the law firms of Michael Baum and Michael Miller, Johnson’s attorneys, said in a statement. “The evidence presented to this jury was, quite frankly, overwhelming.”
Bayer, which currently faces more than 8,700 Roundup-related cases, called the reduction in punitive damages “a step in the right direction,” but said in a statement that it plans to file an appeal with the California Court of Appeal because it believes “that the liability verdict and damage awards are not supported by the evidence at trial or the law.”
“Glyphosate does not cause cancer,” Scott Partridge, a vice president at Monsanto, said in an August statement posted on the company’s website. “The jury got it wrong. We will appeal the jury’s opinion and continue to vigorously defend glyphosate, which is an essential tool for farmers and others.”