Reuters reports that a Philadelphia jury has ordered Bayer to pay $250 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages to a man who claims he developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma from using the weedkiller Roundup.  Monsanto, which manufactured Roundup, was acquired by Bayer in 2018.

The trial judge should reduce the award, which is plainly excessive under BMW v. Gore and State Farm v. Campbell, but that doesn’t always happen, even with billion-dollar awards.

Professor Rick Hasen has posed this question on Election Law Blog: “Are the Courts Likely to Sustain the $65 Million in Punitive Damages Awarded Against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case?”

Hasen’s post discusses a Manhattan jury’s decision last Friday to award $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages against former President Donald Trump for his social media defamation of longtime advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.

Hasen concludes that the punitive damages award is “uncertain to stand,” which sounds about right to me.  If the verdict in this case had occurred in California, the outlook would be similarly cloudy.

As Hasen notes, the U.S. Supreme held in State Farm v. Campbell that the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages should be low, perhaps no more than one-to-one, in cases involving substantial compensatory damages.  If the Trump verdict had occurred in the few years after Campbell was decided, we could have confidently predicted that the courts would reduce the award to something in the $18 million range.  However, as the years have passed, courts have shown an increasing willingness to uphold awards where the ratio exceeds one-to-one, even in cases with very large compensatory damages awards.  For example, in the recent decision in Rudnicki v. Farmers, the California Court of Appeal affirmed an $18.4 million punitive damages award where the compensatory damages were $5.4 million.

The ratio in the Trump case is about 3.6 to one, which might be low enough to survive judicial review if the courts sidestep the one-to-one ratio language in Campbell. We shall see.

Reuters reports that a jury in Washington state court ordered Monsanto to pay $73 million in compensatory damages and $784 million in punitive damages to plaintiffs who claimed that chemicals made by Monsanto leaked from light fixtures in a school and made them sick.

This verdict comes on the heels of a November verdict in which a San Diego jury ordered Monsanto to pay $7 million in compensatory damages and $325 million in punitive damages to a man who alleged he developed cancer from using Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.

When this blog was first launched in 2008, verdicts in excess of $5 million were rare even in California.  A lot has changed since then, and awards of tens or even hundreds of millions of punitive damages are becoming ever more common.

Law360 reports that a jury in San Francisco County Superior Court has awarded $5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages to a former hotel employee who alleged that his employer failed to accommodate his disability. Marriott is likely to file a new trial motion asking the trial court to reduce the damages, which seem unusually large for a case of this nature.

BBC news reports that a jury in Texas has awarded $200 million in compensatory damages and $1 billion in punitive damages to a woman who sued her ex-boyfriend for posting intimate photos of her online.  As the story notes, the award is uncollectible.  The defendant is not a billionaire.  But awards like this, and the press coverage of them, benefits plaintiffs and their attorneys in other punitive damages cases by normalizing verdicts of this size.

National Law Review reports that the Illinois legislature has passed a bill, House Bill 0219, that would make punitive damages available in wrongful death actions.  The articles states that under current Illinois law, punitive damages are available only to the victim and do not survive the victim’s death.  Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has not yet signed the bill into law but is expected to do so.

California law does not permit punitive damages in wrongful death actions brought by the heirs of a decedent, but they are recoverable in a survival action on behalf of the decedent’s estate.

Financial Times reports on New York case in which a judge has awarded $50 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages to billionaire hedge fund founder Louis Bacon.  The defendant is Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard.  Bacon claims Nygard defamed him in multiple ways—by falsely asserting that Bacon is a Ku Klux Klan member, that he was guilty of insider trading, that he was involved in the death of an employee, and that he was involved in arson.

The $100 million damages award in this case may be the least of Nygard’s legal problems.  He is in jail awaiting trial in Canada on charges of sexual assault, and has been charged in the US with racketeering and sex trafficking.  His businesses are already in bankruptcy, so he may not have the resources to pay the damages award in this case anyway.

AP reports on a verdict in federal district court in Georgia awarding $10.5 million in compensatory damages and $125.5 million in punitive damages to a Georgia couple who alleged that their land was polluted by a neighboring solar panel facility.  Given the disparity between the punitive damages and the compensatory damages, the punitive awards seems unlikely to survive posttrial and appellate review.

WGRZ reports on a verdict in Erie County New York awarding $50 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages for violation of New York’s 2019 Child Victims Act.

The LA Times reports on a verdict in Riverside County Superior Court awarding $836 million in compensatory damages and $1.44 punitive damages.  The plaintiff is a 39-year-old woman who sued her stepfather for sexual abuse. Prior to trial, the plaintiff obtained a $200,000 settlement from her mother and a $1 million settlement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The plaintiff alleged that her mother and the church knew about the abuse and did nothing to protect her.  Those settlements are likely to be her only real recovery in the case—as the article notes, the verdict against her stepfather is “largely symbolic and unlikely ever to be fully paid.”