Columbus Federal Jury Awards $12.5 Million in DuPont C-8 Cancer Trial

For more than fifty years, DuPont discharged a chemical called C-8, also known as PFOA, from its Washington Works plant on the Ohio River near Parkersburg, West Virginia. The chemical spread into the drinking water of communities downstream, including Belpre and Little Hocking, Ohio. Kenneth Vigneron Sr., a 56-year-old resident of Vincent, Ohio, drank that water for years. He was later diagnosed with testicular cancer.

A panel of independent scientists, created under an earlier class settlement, studied tens of thousands of residents in the affected water districts. In 2012 the panel reported a probable link between C-8 exposure and several diseases, testicular cancer and kidney cancer among them. That finding cleared the way for thousands of residents to sue. About 3,500 personal injury claims were consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

Vigneron's case was the third of those claims to reach a jury. The first two trials had ended in verdicts of $1.6 million for Carla Bartlett, who had kidney cancer, and $5.6 million for David Freeman, who had testicular cancer. Those trials worked as tests of evidence that would shape the value of the remaining cases.

The Vigneron trial went before Judge Edmund A. Sargus in Columbus. In late December 2016, the jury found DuPont negligent and awarded $2 million in compensatory damages. The case then moved to a punitive phase, where jurors considered whether DuPont had acted with malice. The plaintiff's evidence showed that the company understood C-8 was dangerous and kept releasing it into the water supply anyway.

On January 5, 2017, the same jury added $10.5 million in punitive damages, bringing the total to $12.5 million. Jurors also found DuPont responsible for Vigneron's attorney fees. "The jury sent DuPont a strong message with its punitive damage verdict," said Harry Deitzler, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys. Cory Watson principal Jon Conlin served as co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs' steering committee in the multidistrict litigation, the structure that produced the Bartlett, Freeman, and Vigneron verdicts.

The verdict never went through a full appeal. On February 13, 2017, about five weeks after the punitive award, DuPont and its spinoff Chemours agreed to pay $670.7 million to resolve every C-8 personal injury claim in the litigation, roughly 3,550 cases in all, including Vigneron's.