California Judge Cuts Award for $ 78.5 million in Monsanto Weedkiller Case: NPR

Plaintiff DeWayne Johnson looks up for a short break as the Monsanto trial in San Francisco in July. On Monday, San Francisco judge reduced the damage to Monsanto owned by Bayer to 78 million dollars.

Josh Edelson / AP

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Josh Edelson / AP

Plaintiff DeWayne Johnson looks up for a short break as the Monsanto trial in San Francisco in July. On Monday, a judge in San Francisco reduced the damage to Monsanto, owned by Bayer, to $ 78 million.

Josh Edelson / AP

A supreme judge in San Francisco has maintained a court tribunal against Bayers Monsanto, producer of Weedkiller Roundup, but slossed the penalty by more than $ 200 million.

The jury had awarded $ 250 million in immediate injury and $ 39.25 million in compensatory damages to Dewayne Johnson, a scooter and pest manager in Northern California's school district as contracted cancer.

But San Francisco Chief Judge Suzanne Bolanos wrote on Monday that the relationship between compensatory injuries and punitive damages was required to be 1 to 1 – thus reducing the amount of penalties to $ 39.25 million. “/>

San Francisco Chronicle reported that Judge Bolanos had suggested earlier this month that she might want to reverse almost the entire damage price and wrote that the plaintiff's Attorneys did not provide sufficient evidence that some Monsanto employees believed that exposure to Roundup caused non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Johnson had testified that he sprayed a high concentration of herbicide Roundup called Ranger Pro 20 to 30 times a year, for two to three hours a day.

Several jury members wrote a letter to the judge, lobbying her not to persuade them. "You may not have been convinced of the evidence, but we were," wrote one of them.

The letters may have affected Bolanos, who wrote on Tuesday: "By enforcing expired procedural limits, the Court does not sit as a substitute for a jury, but only as a check at arbitrary prices."

Johnson must decide to accept the reduced price; If he does not, there will be a new trial that only takes into account punitive damages.

Johnson's case was tracked because of its forecast, and it could have lasting consequences for the German multinational company Bayer, which completed the acquisition of Monsanto in June. It no longer uses the Monsanto name.

"The court's decision to reduce the penalty for over $ 200 million is a step in the right direction," said Bayer spokesman Christopher Loder Chronicle . "We continue to believe that the charge judgment and damage rates are not supported by the evidence in the trial or the law and plan to appeal with the California Court of Appeal."

The Bayer stock had fallen 9 percent from Tuesday morning.

Bloomberg reports that there are an additional 8 700 plaintiffs claiming that they were infected with glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup. Extrapolation of the price to Johnson would mean a $ 680 billion liability for Bayer, according to analyst Ian Hilliker from Jefferies LLC in London.

Glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup are legal in the United States, but as NPR's Bill Chappell reported in July, "Monsanto claims got a boost in 2015 when the International Cancer Research Agency – part of the World Health Organization – announced that two pesticides, including glyphosate, is "probably carcinogenic to humans. ""