Jury awards $80M in Monsanto cancer trial

SAN FRANCISCO -- A unanimous federal jury awarded a 70-year-old man more than $80 million after finding Monsanto recklessly marketed and sold massively popular weedkillers that led to his cancer.

After a day of deliberating, the six-person jury found the Bayer-AG company liable for failure to warn, negligence and design defect claims.

Plaintiff Edwin Hardeman was awarded $75 million in punitive damages, roughly $5 million in future and past noneconomic damages and $200,000 in economic damages.

Bayer immediately announced it would appeal. "The verdict in this trial has no impact on future cases and trials, as each one has its own factual and legal circumstances," a statement by spokesperson Charla Lord reads.

The verdict ends a month-long, two-part trial over Hardeman's allegations that exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The trial was the first of three test cases in the consolidated litigation against Monsanto before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria. In re: Roundup Liability Litigation, 16-MD02741 (N.D. Cal., filed Oct. 4, 2016).

The causation stage ended March 19 with the jury finding the weedkiller caused Hardeman's cancer, setting the stage for the jury to determine misconduct and damages.

In the second stage of the trial, plaintiff's attorneys argued Monsanto strategically chose not to fund studies that could potentially lead to unfavorable findings while tampering in other analyses looking at the association between exposure to Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Monsanto, which was bought by Bayer for $63 billion in June, successfully manipulated the science and public opinion for decades, plaintiff's attorney Jennifer Moore of the Moore Law Firm said at trial.

The defense maintained the Environmental Protection Agency and several European regulators repeatedly found glyphosate to be safe and attempted to portray the other side as working in bad faith to prove suspect allegations of misconduct

Monsanto attorney Brian Stekloff repeatedly urged jurors to consider the "full picture."

Monsanto is represented by Stekloff and Tammara M. Johnson, who are both with Wilkinson, Walsh & Eskovitz.

Hardeman is represented by Moore and Aimee H. Wagstaff of Andrus Wagstaff.

Bayer is facing roughly 11,200 lawsuits -- up from 9,300 at the end of October -- alleging its glyphosate-based products cause cancer.

An Alameda Superior Court trial against Monsanto starts March 28.