Bayer will appeal a jury verdict from a local court in Philadelphia awarding $175 million, including $150 million in punitive damages, to an 83-year-old city resident who claimed exposure to Roundup caused his cancer.
“We respectfully disagree with the jury’s divided verdict and are confident we can get this unfounded verdict overturned and the excessive damage awards reduced through our appeal, given that there were significant and reversible legal and evidentiary errors made during this trial,” a spokesperson for Bayer told Agri-Pulse.
The jury, however, "held Monsanto responsible for causing our client’s cancer," said Caranci's co-lead counsel, Tom Kline of Philadelphia law firm Kline & Specter and Jason Itkin, a lawyer with Houston-based Arnold & Itkin.
“We’re happy Ernie Caranci was awarded justice,” Kline and Itkin said in a joint statement. “The verdict is a harbinger for things to come in the Roundup litigation.”
Caranci claimed he had used more than 500 gallons of Roundup between 1989 and 2014, somewhere between two to three times a week, which his attorneys said led to his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Oct. 27 verdict in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas came a week after a jury in state court in Missouri awarded a plaintiff $1.25 million in a separate case. Bayer said it also would appeal that decision.
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“We have a winning record in the Roundup litigation — having won nine of the last eleven cases at trial — and have resolved the majority of claims filed in this litigation,” Bayer said.
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