Reuters reports that a jury in Washington state court ordered Monsanto to pay $73 million in compensatory damages and $784 million in punitive damages to plaintiffs who claimed that chemicals made by Monsanto leaked from light fixtures in a school and made them sick.
This verdict comes on the heels of a November verdict in which a San Diego jury ordered Monsanto to pay $7 million in compensatory damages and $325 million in punitive damages to a man who alleged he developed cancer from using Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.
When this blog was first launched in 2008, verdicts in excess of $5 million were rare even in California. A lot has changed since then, and awards of tens or even hundreds of millions of punitive damages are becoming ever more common.
