Dole Food Company announced today that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney has dismissed the $2.5 million in punitive damages that a jury awarded against Dole last November.

In Tellez v. Dole, a group of Nicaraguan farm works claimed that Dole acted with malice against them in the use of the agricultural chemical DBCP on contracted banana farms in Nicaragua nearly 30 years ago. The punitive damages claim raised some interesting constitutional issues, since the plaintiffs were foreign nationals seeking punitive damages under California law for acts that occurred in a foreign country. Dole complained that the punitive damages ran afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in BMW v. Gore that punitive damages cannot be based on acts that were lawful where they occurred. Apparently, Judge Chaney agreed.

As far as I can tell, the Oregon Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Goddard v. Farmers Insurance may be the first time the Oregon Supreme Court has ever reduced a punitive damages award as unconstitutionally excessive in the 12 years since the U.S. Supreme Court established the due process constraints on punitive damages in BMW v. Gore. This is quite a surprising turn of events from the court that recently affirmed a $79.5 million punitive damages award after a reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In addition to Williams, here are some other cases in which the Oregon high court has rejected excessiveness arguments:

Parrott v. Carr Chevrolet, Inc., 17 P.3d 473, 487-90 (Or. 2001) (applying BMW v. Gore, but approving an 87:1 ratio in light of the defendant’s “particularly egregious acts”);

Lakin v. Senco Prods., Inc., 987 P.2d 463, 476 (Or. 1999) (affirming $4 million punitive damage award in product liability action)

Oberg v. Honda Motor Co., Ltd., 888 P.2d 8, 14 (Or. 1995) (affirming punitive damages award after U.S. Supreme Court had reversed and remanded for excessiveness review).

Is anyone aware of a case, prior to Goddard, in which the Oregon Supreme Court found a punitive damages award to be unconstitutionally excessive?

The Oregon Supreme Court held yesterday in Goddard v. Farmers Insurance Co. that a $20.7 million punitive damage award against Farmers Insurance was excessive because it was 24 times the compensatory award. The Supreme Court found that a 4 to 1 ratio was the constitutional limit.

We previously blogged here about a Nevada jury’s punitive damage award against Wyeth arising out of one of its drugs. Wyeth has now been hit with a $27 million punitive damage award in Arkansas arising from risks allegedly associated with the same hormone replacement drugs at issue in the Nevada case. The compensatory award was $2.75 million, which seems to put this case on the very high end of the scale of the permitted ratio. Wyeth says it will appeal.

The recent decision in Holdgrafer v. Unocal primarily addressed the impropriety of using the defendant’s dissimilar acts towards nonparties as the basis for punitive damages. But the decision also contained an interesting footnote regarding another type of evidence that cannot be used to support a punitive award: evidence of the defendant’s litigation conduct. In footnote 17 on page 30 of the opinion, the court states that plaintiff’s counsel improperly urged the jury to punish Unocal for its assertion of a statute of limitations defense. The court’s statement is significant because, in our experience, plaintiffs often ask juries to punish defendants not only for their tortious conduct, but also for having the nerve to defend themselves. This opinion rejects that sort of insidious attack on a defendant’s right to have his day in court.

Well-known lawyer Mark Geragos was just awarded $2 million in compensatory damages and $16 million in punitive damages in a lawsuit against the people who supposedly illegally taped his conversations with Michael Jackson the day Jackson surrendered to face child molestation charges.

Update (3/4/2008): The punitive damages were awarded after a bench trial and defendants say they will appeal.

ATRA has prepared a nice chart showing recent state reforms of punitive damages. These state reforms include limits on the ratio between punitive and compensatory damages and a requirement that punitive damages be proven by clear and convincing evidence.

A former University of Alabama booster got a $3 million punitive damage award in his lawsuit against the NCAA after being called a “rogue booster” in association with an investigation over NCAA recruiting violations.

A recent report from the National Law Journal shows that in 2007, three of the top seven highest jury awards in the nation were from West Virginia. At number three, the January verdict for $404 million ($270 million in punitive damages) in the Tawney vs. Columbia Natural Resources case in Roane County; at number five, the October verdict of $251 million ($196.2 million in punitive damages) in the Perrine vs. DuPont case in Harrison County; and at number seven, the July verdict of $219 million in the Wheeling Pitt vs. Central West Virginia Energy case in Brooke County.

In a case arising out of a partnership dispute, the Court of Appeal issued an unpublished opinion yesterday that’s not earth shattering, but prompts a note about the scope of second-phase evidence in a bifurcated punitive trial. The jury in this case awarded two attorneys about $4.5 million and $4 million respectively in compensatory damages against their former law partner. And, after finding malice, oppression or fraud, the jury heard evidence from the defendants in the “amount” phase of trial concerning their claimed good faith actions, but still awarded punitive damages totalling almost $2 million.

While the propriety of introducing mitigation evidence during the amount phase of trial was not apparently directly at issue in the case, the court’s discussion of defendant’s challenge to the sufficiency of evidence to support punitive liability suggests there’s nothing suspect about such a procedure (even if it may not always be tactically advisable). The court explained that the mitigation evidence “was not revealed to the jury when it was asked to decide whether appellants had engaged in conduct tantamount to oppression, fraud or malice. . . . Appellants may not assert that the jury failed to consider evidence they chose not to present to nullify its conclusion.” What’s somewhat interesting about this is that we’ve heard arguments by some counsel in other cases that no evidence may be introduced during the second phase of a bifurcated punitive trial aside from information about the defendant’s financial condition, which seems plainly wrong if the jury’s task is to evaluate reprehensibility – anything relevant to that specific task should, presumably, come in from either side.

One last aside—whatever one might think of California’s rules allowing “unpublished” opinions, this case provides an example of an opinion that seems to have been written without any intent to provide guidance to litigants other than the parties before the court. Responding to the defendant’s challenge that no evidence supported punitive liability (i.e., that there was no evidence of conduct that harmed the plaintiffs and was undertaken with malice, oppression or fraud), the court offered this rather unsatisfying description: “The record amply supports the jury’s findings and trial court’s conclusion that appellants engaged in conduct warranting imposition of punitive damages. Specifically, in denying appellants’ motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, the trial court noted that substantial evidence permitted the jury to find ‘the partnership was never concluded properly,’ and Hodge ‘motivated by . . . any one of the factors that are taken into consideration for punitive damages, took advantage of the situation for his own benefit,” in “a conscious, deliberative manner.’”