Plaintiff sprayed Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide during his job as a pest manager for the Benicia Unified School District. He alleged he developed a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a result of his exposure to Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, which has been approved as safe for use in the United States for more than 45 years. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) evaluated glyphosate and concluded that it is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” But before and after IARC reached this conclusion, every regulatory agency that had studied the science—including the EPA and regulators in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—concluded there is insufficient evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. Relying primarily on IARC’s glyphosate determination, Plaintiff sued Monsanto asserting claims for design defect, failure to warn, and punitive damages. The jury returned a verdict for plaintiff on each claim and awarded about $2.25 million in economic damages, $37 million in noneconomic damages, and $250 million in punitive damages. The trial court denied Monsanto’s posttrial motions on the condition that plaintiff accept a reduction of the punitive damages to roughly $39 million—an amount equal to his compensatory damages. Plaintiff accepted the remittitur.
On appeal, Monsanto argued, among other things, that the jury’s $33 million award of future noneconomic damages was excessive. Plaintiff filed a cross appeal arguing that the trial court erred by reducing the punitive award to a one-to-one ratio with the compensatory award. The Court of Appeal agreed with Monsanto that the award of future noneconomic damages was excessive and reduced that award from $33 million to $4 million. The court also reduced the punitive award to an amount equal to the reduced compensatory award, resulting in a total judgment of roughly $20.5 million. The Court of Appeal rejected the rest of Monsanto’s arguments and the arguments asserted by plaintiff in his cross appeal.
Johnson v. Monsanto Company 
