Bayer's Monsanto loses appeal of $611M Roundup verdict in Missouri

Reuters

4 days ago

May 28 (Reuters) - A Missouri appellate court has upheld a $611 million verdict awarded to three people who sued Bayer alleging that its Roundup weedkiller caused their cancer, a ruling the company says it will further appeal.
The decision from the Missouri Court of Appeals' Western District on Tuesday rejected Bayer unit Monsanto's argument that the lower court impermissibly allowed testimony at the 2023 trial about a ruling from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a separate case about the cancer risks of glyphosate, the pesticide in Roundup.
Bayer is wrong in arguing that judicial opinions are categorically inadmissible at a jury trial, the court said. The court upheld the $611 million in compensatory and punitive damages awarded to Daniel Anderson, Jimmy Draeger and Valorie Gunther after their lawsuits were consolidated and tried before a jury.
Bayer has faced thousands of lawsuits over whether Roundup causes cancer since it bought Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018. It agreed to settle much of that litigation for $10.9 billion in 2020, but failed to resolve future cases. About 67,000 remain, in both federal and state court.
Though Bayer has prevailed in many of the Roundup trials, plaintiffs have won more than $4 billion of verdicts. Bayer has been pursuing appeals to reduce the verdict amounts while petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve a broader swath of the cases.
One of Bayer's defenses in the litigation has been that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that glyphosate doesn't pose a risk to human health.
To counter that argument, the plaintiffs in Tuesday's case had told the jury that the 9th Circuit in 2022 found the EPA's determination that glyphosate was not likely to cause cancer was not supported by the evidence and directed the agency to reexamine it.
In a statement, a representative for Monsanto said the company will be seeking further review of the decision to allow the opinion to be presented to jurors.
'In the majority of other cases which went to trial in Missouri, judges properly excluded inadmissible evidence, leading to positive outcomes for the Company,' the statement said.
An attorney for the plaintiffs did not respond to requests for comment.
The plaintiffs filed their lawsuits in 2022, claiming they each had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma after years of using Roundup to control weeds.
A Cole County, Missouri, jury found Monsanto liable for negligence, selling a defective product and failing to warn about Roundup's risks. They awarded $61.1 million of compensatory damages and $1.5 billion of punitive damages.
In March 2024, the trial judge had let the $61.1 million component stand, but reduced punitive damages to nine times that amount, or $549.9 million. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that punitive damages should generally not be more than nine times compensatory damages.
In Tuesday's decision, the appellate court also rejected another of the company's key arguments, that federal law blocks any state law claim that the company failed to warn consumers about the risks. The court agreed with another Missouri appellate district that found Monsanto had not shown an irreconcilable conflict between the federal and state laws.
Thousands of other Roundup cases are pending in Missouri. Another trial over Roundup is underway in St. Louis. It is expected to last through mid-June.
The case is Anderson v. Monsanto Co., Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, No. WD87059.
For Monsanto: Barbara Smith Tyson of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner
For the plaintiffs: Edward Robertson of Bartimus Frickleton Robertson Rader