Bloomberg law reports that a jury in Cook County, Illinois has awarded $363 million, including $325 million in punitive damages, to a woman who claimed she developed breast cancer as the result of breathing chemicals emitted by a medical sterilization plant in her neighborhood.  The defendant, Sterigenics, says it plans to appeal.

CNN is reporting on a $1.7 billion punitive damages award against Ford in a case involving a fatal crash of a Ford F-150 truck.  Although the CNN story doesn’t mention it, liability in the case was established by a sanctions order.  As this Law360 story explains, a prior trial in this case ended in a mistrial and after the mistrial, the court sanctioned Ford for violating court orders about witness testimony.  The court sanctioned Ford by instructing the jury in the second trial that Ford’s design was defective and that Ford acted willfully and recklessly.  The second jury then awarded $1.7 billion in punitive damages based on the court’s description of Ford’s conduct.  Both articles report that Ford plans to appeal.

Law360 is reporting that a jury in Texas has awarded $7B billion in punitive damages against Charter Communications, which does business as Spectrum.

The plaintiffs are family members of an 83-year-old woman who was stabbed to death by a Spectrum employee.  The jury awarded 10 percent fault to the attacker and 90 percent fault to Spectrum.  The Law360 article doesn’t explain the plaintiffs’ rationale for holding Spectrum more responsible than the assailant.

Texas has a statutory cap on punitive damages but the cap does not apply when the defendant’s conduct falls within a list of enumerated felonies.  One of listed felonies is forgery.  The jury in this case found that Spectrum intentionally forged an arbitration agreement, and the plaintiffs are relying on that finding to argue that the cap doesn’t apply.

The plaintiff who won a jury award for $137 million against Tesla has decided to take the case back to trial, rather than accepting the trial court’s reduction of the damages to a total of $15 million ($13.5 million in punitive damages and $1.5 million in compensatory damages).  Law360 has the story (subscription required).

It’s rare for a plaintiff to reject a remittitur that still provides such a large recovery.  For this gamble to pay off,  the plaintiff and his lawyers need to try the case again, win a verdict in excess of $15 million, and then defend that award against another set of post-trial motions and possibly an appeal.  It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been having some technical difficulties, which resulted in some garbled text being posted.  Those posts were removed, but I’ve been unable to add any new posts for a while. I think we’ve got everything sorted now and I’ll be posting again to catch up on developments I missed while we were down.

When we first reported on this $130 million punitive damages award against Tesla, we commented that the award was not likely to survive judicial review.  As expected, Judge Orrick in the Northern District of California has reduced the total award from $137 million to $15 million.  Reuters has a report here.

Judge Orrick cut the compensatory damages to $1.5 million (from $6.9 million) and cut the punitive damages down to $13.5 million.  That’s still a big payday for the plaintiff and his lawyers, and far in excess of the $300,000 damages caps that apply to employment cases brought under Title VII.

We previously reported about an Ohio jury’s award of $33 million in punitive damages against Oberlin College.  The trial court later reduced the amount of punitive damages to $18.8 million, after litigation over how Ohio’s cap on punitive damages should apply when compensatory damages are also capped (the court ruled that the two-to-one punitive-to-compensatory damages cap should be based on the uncapped compensatory damages awarded by the jury).

Today, the Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the award as reduced, rejecting appeals by both sides.  Insider Higher Ed has coverage here.

Forbes reports here on a recent Texas jury verdict awarding $70 million, including $40 million in punitive damages, to 10 Black workers who sued their former employer, Glow Networks, for discrimination and retaliation.

Law 360 predicts that a $148 million punitive damages award, given to the widow of a smoker, won’t survive appellate review.  That’s a solid prediction, in light of the Florida Supreme Court’s November 2021 decision in Sheffield v. R.J. Reynolds.  

Sheffield interpreted a 1999 Florida law that prohibits courts from imposing punitive damages on a defendant who has already been punished for the same conduct.  The Supreme Court held that the law barred punitive damages in a case brought by the wife of a smoker who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1994 and died in 2007.  The court held that the plaintiff’s wrongful death claim did not accrue until the smoker’s death, and therefore the 1999 statute applied, prohibiting punitive damages.

The $148 million award at issue in the Law360 story seems destined for reversal on the same grounds.