Monsanto is not finding an early hometown advantage as it prepares for the next Roundup cancer trial after the St. Louis judge who will oversee the trial denied Monsanto’s motion for summary judgment and denied the company’s request to ban experts scheduled to testify for the plaintiff.
Before selling to Germany-based Bayer AG last year, Monsanto was headquartered in the St. Louis, Missouri area for decades, and still maintains a large employment and philanthropic presence there. Some observers have speculated that a St. Louis jury may give Monsanto a good shot at its first trial win in the sprawling litigation. The company lost the first three trials, all of which took place in California.
But St. Louis County Judge Brian May is not doing Monsanto any favors. In twin rulings, May denied Monsanto’s motion for summary judgment before trial and rejected the company’s request to exclude the opinions of seven expert witnesses that the plaintiff’s attorneys plan to call to testify.
Judge May also ordered that the trial can be recorded and televised via Courtroom View Network from its start on Aug. 19 until conclusion.
The plaintiff in the case is Sharlean Gordon, a cancer-stricken woman in her 50s who used Roundup herbicides for more than 15 years at her residence in South Pekin, Illinois. Gordon v. Monsanto is actually derived from a case filed in July 2017 on behalf of more than 75 plaintiffs. Gordon is the first of that group to go to trial.
Her case, like that of the thousands of others filed around the United States, alleges use of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides can cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto has long known about the potential risks but instead of warning users has actively worked to suppress information.
Gordon was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in 2006. She was told her cancer was in remission in 2007 but it returned in 2008. Since then she has gone through two stem cell transplants and spent a lengthy period in a nursing home. She remains very debilitated, according to attorney Aimee Wagstaff.
Wagstaff was the winning attorney in the second Roundup cancer trial, Edwin Hardeman v. Monsanto. In that federal court case, a San Francisco jury returned a verdict of approximately $80 million for Hardeman, including punitive damages of $75 million. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria reduced the punitive damages awarded Hardeman to $20 million from $75 million, putting the total award at $25,313,383.02.
The jury awards in the other two Roundup cancer trials have also been reduced by the trial judges. In the most recent trial a judge cut the damages awarded an elderly couple from approximately $2 billion to $86 million. And in the first Roundup cancer trial, the judge cut a $289 million verdict awarded to a California school groundskeeper down to $78 million.
