$2.2 Billion Verdict Against Pharmacist Who Diluted Chemotherapy Drugs, Later Reduced to $330 Million With Little Collected
After trial: The trial judge reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and actual collection was minimal: Courtney's assets were forfeited to a federal victims' fund. Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb paid about $71 million to roughly 360 plaintiffs in related settlements.
Won by Davis, Bethune & Jones, L.L.C..
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.
What happened
Robert Courtney owned pharmacies in Kansas City, Missouri, that filled prescriptions for cancer clinics. For roughly a decade he diluted the drugs he dispensed and kept the difference. Federal prosecutors concluded the scheme touched about 98,000 prescriptions written by 400 doctors for some 4,200 patients. The fraud came apart in 2001, when a drug company sales representative noticed that a local oncology practice was buying far less chemotherapy medication from Courtney's supplier than the pharmacy was billing for. The oncologist had samples tested. They contained a fraction of the prescribed dose.
Georgia Hayes, an ovarian cancer patient, was one of Courtney's victims. More than 400 lawsuits were filed against him in Jackson County. Hers was the only one to reach trial.
Kansas City trial lawyers Grant Davis and Michael Ketchmark tried the case for Hayes. On October 10, 2002, after hearing how Courtney had watered down the medication Hayes depended on, the Jackson County jury returned $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages. Jurors said afterward they wanted to send a message. Courtney's own lawyer told the panel he understood the community's outrage. Davis practices today at Davis, Bethune & Jones. Ketchmark went on to lead Ketchmark & McCreight.
The number that made headlines is not the number that survived. The trial judge reduced the award to $30.1 million in compensatory damages and $300 million in punitive damages, roughly $330 million in all. Even the reduced judgment was largely symbolic. Courtney's assets, valued in the low tens of millions, had already been frozen and forfeited to the federal government for a victims' fund. Hayes said at the time that she would probably never see a dime, but that justice had been done.
The criminal case ran alongside the civil one. Courtney pleaded guilty in February 2002 to 20 federal counts of tampering with and adulterating the chemotherapy drugs Taxol and Gemzar. In December 2002 a federal judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He was released to home confinement in July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, seven years short of his full term.
The money that actually reached victims came mostly from other defendants. Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the manufacturers of the diluted drugs, faced claims that their own sales records should have exposed the scheme years earlier. The two companies paid a combined $71 million to settle with roughly 360 plaintiffs, and the insurer for Courtney and his pharmacies contributed another $35 million.
The Hayes verdict remains one of the largest ever returned for a single plaintiff in an American courtroom, and the case reshaped how drug distribution records are audited. What the jury awarded and what the victims recovered were two very different figures: $2.2 billion on the verdict form, and a share of about $106 million in settlements plus the proceeds of Courtney's forfeited assets in the end.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Lawrence Journal-World (AP) -- 'Jury tells pharmacist to pay $2 billion for diluting drugs' (Oct. 11, 2002)
- 2.KCUR (NPR Kansas City) -- retrospective on the Courtney case, the reduced award, his sentence, and the manufacturer and insurer settlements (July 13, 2020)
- 3.MoreLaw verdict report -- Georgia Hayes v. Robert R. Courtney, Case No. 02CV219832, attorneys of record and damages breakdown
- 4.Davis, Bethune & Jones, L.L.C. (firm)
More proven verdicts from Davis, Bethune & Jones, L.L.C.
All Davis, Bethune & Jones, L.L.C. proven verdicts →A St. Louis jury awarded $28 million in compensatory damages and $149 million in punitive damages to Shannon Dugan, a New Jersey sheriff's deputy who was sexually assaulted by a Hyatt security guard who used his master key to enter her hotel room while she slept. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the full award in December 2024.
A 15-year-old boy went into Arkansas Children's Hospital for surgery to remove the brain tissue causing his seizures. The surgeon opened the wrong side of his head and removed healthy tissue before turning to the correct side. His parents were not told, and learned of it more than a year later during an unrelated examination.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Detroit federal jury awarded former Michigan inmate Kohchise Jackson $307.6 million after the state's for-profit prison health contractor refused to pay for the $919 surgery that would have reversed his colostomy.