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Philadelphia Jury Hits Monsanto with $2.25B Roundup Verdict
- dylan604 3y agoWaiting for upcoming news about Monsanto spinning off the Roundup division into a new company that suddenly files for bankruptcy.
- Seattle3503 3y agoMore likely Monsanto appeals and the damages get much smaller. Juries like to award much larger sums than judges.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoIndeed. 250 million compensation + 2 billion punitive is an immense amount of money. The median wrongful death settlement in California is between $250,000 and $500,000, and the average payout for car accident deaths in the United States is around $1.5 million. I dont really understand the criteria around what counts as liability for a defective product. Cars and guns routinely kill people, but are useful tools. Roundup or baby powder kills someone in unintuitive and statistically remote ways, and you have multi-billion dollar settlements.
- throwup238 3y agoIANAL but punitive damages are meant to punish defendants to force them to reform and deter future misconduct. They're supposed to be outrageously large, otherwise they're toothless. It's kind of the grand bargain in liability law in the US - fewer regulators and regulations but courts can hand down punishing rulings. In a car or gun based wrongful death lawsuit, usually the defendant is the user not the manufacturer so punishing them with a $100 million ruling doesn't do anything - a $1.5 million ruling is already life changing unless they've got bulletproof liability insurance. They usually don't have anywhere near that kind of money and a ruling against them won't prevent future users from shooting or hitting someone with a car, whereas corporations are (ostensibly) able to make proper long term risk calculations.
- chasil 3y agoThis makes me think of the Oberlin College judgment. The jury awarded more than the law allowed to Gibson's bakery, so the $44 million dollar judgment was cut by the judge to $25. Obviously, both Monsanto and Purdue are in a whole different class and scale of harm, but the law can and does cap damages. I don't know why the limits weren't made plain to the jurors, as it just drug out the procedure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson's_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson's_Bakery_v._Oberlin_C...
- nick222226 3y agoReduced to $25 million, to be clear.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoIt usually has something to do with willfully hiding evidence that the product is inherently unsafe and avoiding safety protocols that would save lives. The canonical case in my mind is the Ford Pinto. They knew the flaws in the design existed but valued the cost to fix them greater than the societal cost of deaths caused by the flaws. You find these in a lot of cases like this, big tobacco, Johnson and Johnson, Purdue, etc, often have essentially evil knowing decisions to hide safety issues with their product. Cars (and to a lesser degree guns) are pretty well regulated and basically as long as you follow the spirit of the regulations and engage above board with regulators you’ll be ok. It’s a mutually agreed upon risk management between the public and the companies. There are definitely cases where a danger is known and thought acceptable and the law or regulation shifts, and you’re protected to some degree as long as you were in compliance and weren’t hiding an otherwise unknown risk. Likewise there are things you discover later and as long as you act on it in a forthright way you’re ok. But risk management isn’t about avoiding all risks. It’s about balance, and being rigorously transparent.
- singularity2001 3y agoHow many years after the merger with Bayer can the merger be rolled back because of hidden evidence and the enormous damages?
- elbasti 3y agoI assume this comment is a reference to Purdue Pharma preemptively filing for bankrupcy after losing a bunch of lawsuits due to the (surely!) criminal way in which they--and the Sackler family that owns it--sold opiods. However, as much as I hate the Sacklers, I have to pipe in here out of a respect for the truth (Gell-Mann Amnesia style). The Purdue bankruptcy was not some sort of Machiavellian "get out of jail free" card. Rather, it is what is normally done when there are so many lawsuits on a company that it is likely they exceed the value of the company itself. Everyone who sues and wins against Purdue will become a creditor of the company. But they will be owed much more than the company is worth. So who should get paid? The first person to sue? The last? The one worst off? Parceling out the assets of a company among its creditors is the job of a bankruptcy court, and that is why Purdue declared bankruptcy preemptively. Not to screw over the creditors, but rather to protect them so that a judge can decide who gets what. This is standard operating procedure when a company believes there are more creditors than it can pay, even if the creditors have not filed suit yet. There are certainly horrible things about the way Purdue has been handled—chiefly among them that the members of the Purdue family are not being criminally prosecuted—but the whole bankruptcy thing is not one of them. I would suggest reading Matt Levine's analyis of the whole debacle, both "The purdue bankruptcy didn't work (2021)" [0] and the follow up "Purdue Pharma's Bankruptcy works now (2023)" [1] [0]: https://archive.is/BNzqi https://archive.is/BNzqi [1]: https://archive.is/lScV9 https://archive.is/lScV9
- dylan604 3y ago> I assume this comment is a reference to Purdue Pharma sure, assume away. I was thinking more of J&J's talc=>asbestos, Alex Jones, and all of the other cases. It's not like the Sacklers are original thinkers. Some of us have memories longer than goldfishes
- thedailymail 3y agoThe J&J case is one of the most famous examples of "Texas two-step" bankruptcy, but I didn't know until now that there have only been four companies that used this strategy (all represented by the same law firm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy
- hibikir 3y agoMonsanto hasn't been a separate company for years: Bayer bought them out for 63 billion in 2018: A coup for the Monsanto CEO, as Bayer's total market cap today is 34 billion, and that includes all the pharma and chemical work too, not just crop science. When they were independent, their legal team had a very successful track record, but I am told the majority of them just retired with the very large windfall they got out of that merger. Given that Bayer has a different CEO than when the merger occurred, it'd not be crazy if Bayer jettisoned all of crop science away. For all the concerns about Roundup, I'd expect the Dicamba legal risks to weigh down the value of keeping crop science at all. It might not be remembered as as silly a merger as AOL acquiring Time Warner, but it's close.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoWhy are they down so much?
- ryukoposting 3y agoThe Roundup lawsuits are a factor. One of their largest products is an albatross.
- dylan604 3y agoIt does stretch credibility that this kind of thing wasn't discovered during due diligence of the acquisition.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoThey didn’t expect to lose these cases. They think the scientific facts are in their favor.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoIt's only 2.5 bill. In the grand scheme, not that much. Or, are you saying that product line now goes to zero? I don't know how much they are making out of that line.
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- elijah_moham 3y ago[dead]
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- google234123 3y agoThis is so ridiculous, the science points to the fact that the claim that it causes cancer is not true... I really don't like the american justice system. We literally live next to coal plants that put chemicals in the air 24/7 that are certainly certainly causing cancer for people later... You can find studies showing certain meats are correlated with cancer, can we sue the grocery stores?
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- viraptor 3y ago> You can find studies showing certain meats are correlated with cancer, can we sue the grocery stores? When a grocery store starts to take over the production chain for both the meat and the process and chemicals involved and pushing their products globally as a solution, and being litigious to a stupid degree, and ... Then yeah, I hope we can sue the grocery store involved. (As long as the studies actually hold up and that specific store is causing health problems others aren't)
- s1artibartfast 3y ago[flagged]
- dooopdoop 3y ago[dead]
- Analemma_ 3y agoI mean I would also support levying multi-billion dollar fines against coal plants. Frankly in terms of the negative externalities they have caused they probably owe that many times over.
- ryukoposting 3y agoThe American coal industry employs less than 50,000 people. For $5B, you could close every coal plant, give every single person a $100,000 severance package and tell them to go find a job elsewhere.
- viraptor 3y agoDifferent source, unpaywalled https://archive.md/mDous https://archive.md/mDous
- sva_ 3y agoI didn't notice there was a paywall upon submission. If you use bypass paywall clean[0], you won't see it either. But thanks for the link. 0. https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
- nolok 3y agoOn one hand, this extension is great. On the other hand, it has to be one of the most direct way I can contribute to the fall of actual journalism in the internet era, allowing myself to read quality content that the writer ask money for without ever being reminded that I could pay for it ...
- mjcohen 3y agoI guess that this somewhat contradicts Monsanto's real motto: Without chemicals, life itself would be unprofitable.
- justrealist 3y agoI feel like we need to acknowledge that 12 average jury pool members are probably not the best panel of scientific experts to determine whether a chemical is carcinogenic. Much less calculate the damages involved. Like at this point it would be more scientific to run a Facebook poll. Jury trials are a great system for criminal justice but kinda need to admit this is not the same.
- lestertomlin 3y agoThat’s the point. Jury is a bunch of regular people. I think it’s actually pretty cool because otherwise decisions are based on “legal mumbo jumbo” that no “normal” person would ever be able to understand.
- calculatte 3y agoSo the average citizen is a barely-conscious slobbering fool. While Bayer Monstanto, the multibillion dollar organization that knowingly shipped HIV-contaminated blood products somehow deserves your defense? Alarm bells are ringing.
- justrealist 3y agoThe average IQ is 100.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago[George Carlin joke here.] If the defense presented compelling epidemiologist testimony and statistics, it's difficult to bullshit concrete evidence. The jury just had to act as a marginally-adequate bullshit detector. The premise of a pool of disinterested, random individuals settling disputes is occasionally problematic in isolation but superior to duels at dawn, Hatfields vs McCoys, or troubling the corn or pimentos.
- wolverine876 3y ago> it would be more scientific to run a Facebook poll The jurors have spent many, many hours personally hearing testimony and examining evidence, all of which is vetted to meet courtroom standards. Do you consider yourself fit to serve on such a jury?
- nightowl_games 3y agoWatched the movie Michael Clayton this morning which seems to be basically about Monsanto and Roundup. I know about the cases and it's always distressing to me because my dad was a farmer who grew round up ready canola and I grew up drinking water from a well on this farm. My dad is cancer free ATM, but it is unsettling to think about.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI wouldn't worry too much about it. The global and national cancer trends don't track Roundup entering the food system or the agricultural sector. To the extent it might be a carcinogen, it's not a dominant environmental carcinogen relative to other forces.
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- lozenge 3y agoWell, most people globally aren't drinking from a well near a farm that uses Roundup. So that isn't really relevant for this person.
- shadowgovt 3y agoBut most everyone is eating food that was treated with Roundup during its cultivation. If it was an unsafe at any dose chemical like lead, the global medical numbers should bear that out by now. Meanwhile, levels are monitored at locations like farms where it's actively used.
- shellfishgene 3y agoIf your dad drinks alcohol every now and then you probably don't need to worry too much about roundup, alcohol is a much stronger carcinogen and there is not even a debate about it like for glyphosate.
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- 1letterunixname 3y agoPatrick Moore will settle this by offering to drink "perfectly safe"(tm) glyphosate.
- at_a_remove 3y agoI have a sciences degree, and I'm not a complete weenie about some of the downright amazing things we have accomplished, but some time ago it occurred to me -- and I haven't really been able to rid myself of it -- that we have replaced some previously "mechanical" processes with chemicals, which we then haven't developed a good set of strictures around developing. Pull a weed? No, spray a crop. We could polish a thing thing but instead we will apply a coating. And so forth. Now, "pulling weeds" doesn't spread. It doesn't end up in water and going downstream. The act of polishing doesn't end up in food. I am beginning to think that chemical design should include facets like "breaks down with such and such a halflife at STP" (and then the same rules apply to the breakdown products) and "everyone involved who wants to say it is safe, down to the CEO, needs to bathe in this crap for ten years before accepting any kind of financial benefit." Then again, I also spend a lot of time wondering how much of the "cide market" (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, et al) could be replaced by wee robots trundling their way through rows of vegetables, detecting weeds and yanking them, applying small and targeted blasts of fungicide here and there, plucking away insects and their eggs, and so on. Would such robots be affordable? Could they break even against the chemical approach? Or would they cost more and would we collectively decide to pay that price?
- beAbU 3y agoGiven infinite money, is it possible to build a robot /today/ that can do all the things you list, in a reliable manner, capable of scaling up to industrial farm levels?
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- 127361 3y agoPolychlorinated Biphenyls, Agent Orange, 2,3,7,8-TCDD, aspartame, patented GM crops and now glyphosate the list goes on. Monsanto (now Bayer) is really living up to the name of "evil corporation". https://dioxindorms.com/content/chronology.html https://dioxindorms.com/content/chronology.html https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41271-018-0146-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41271-018-0146-8 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/24/monsanto-agent-orange-west-virginia https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/24/monsanto...
- SeanLuke 3y agoWait, what, aspartame? You tried to slip that one in, didn't you.
- 127361 3y agoIt's been classed as an IARC Group 2B suspected carcinogen, this is new research (2023). https://www.who.int/news/item/14-07-2023-aspartame-hazard-and-risk-assessment-results-released https://www.who.int/news/item/14-07-2023-aspartame-hazard-an... https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2023/06/widely-used-soda-food-artificial-sweetener-possible-carcinogen-who https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2023/06/widely-u...
- dpratt71 3y agoThe word "suspected" does not appear on the report you linked. Rather it says it is a "possible" carcinogenic. Moreover > The committee therefore reaffirmed that it is safe for a person to consume within this limit per day. For example, with a can of diet soft drink containing 200 or 300 mg of aspartame, an adult weighing 70kg would need to consume more than 9–14 cans per day to exceed the acceptable daily intake, assuming no other intake from other food sources.
- earthling8118 3y agoWhile I do think that is an unreasonable amount for a normal person to consume, I've also met a person who would easily hit that number. Most of us should be safe though.
- hulitu 3y ago> Philadelphia Jury Hits Monsanto with $2.25B Roundup Verdict Haha, the vaccine doses thrown on the window in EU were more expensive.