The $107 Million Mesothelioma Verdict Against Union Carbide for the Death of Irvine Janitor Joel Hernandezcueva, Set Aside in Its Entirety Five Months Later When the Trial Court Found Juror Misconduct, Attorney Misconduct, and Insufficient Evidence

From about 1992 to 1995, Joel Hernandezcueva worked as a janitor and maintenance man at Park Place, a mixed-use complex in Irvine, California, built in the early and mid-1970s for the Fluor Corporation. The complex's original walls had been finished with an asbestos-containing joint compound, and when tenant-improvement crews demolished those walls during renovations, Hernandezcueva cleaned up after them. His family alleged that Union Carbide had been the exclusive supplier of the raw asbestos fiber in the Hamilton joint compound that drywall subcontractor E.F. Brady had applied throughout the complex decades earlier.

In 2011 Hernandezcueva, a Long Beach father of four, was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, and in December 2011 he and his wife Jovana sued dozens of companies in Los Angeles County Superior Court, case BC475956, captioned against lead defendant American Standard. He died on April 5, 2014, while the case was still being fought. The litigation's first decade belonged mostly to the defense: a 1990s-exposure case against long-dissolved construction-era defendants is hard to prove, and a 2013 trial ended with a nonsuit and defense verdict. The family kept appealing, and in December 2015 the Court of Appeal revived the strict liability claim against E.F. Brady in a published decision, Hernandezcueva v. E.F. Brady Co. (2016) 243 Cal.App.4th 249, sending the case back for another trial.

That retrial finally came in summer 2023, a dozen years after filing, with Benjamin Adams of Dean Omar Branham Shirley leading the trial team for the family. In a two-phase trial before Judge Cary Nishimoto, the jury returned its verdicts on July 7 and July 11, 2023: $32 million in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages, roughly $107 million in total. It apportioned 46.4 percent of the fault to Union Carbide, finding the company had acted with malice, along with 10 percent to E.F. Brady and 5 percent to Elementis Chemicals. The result was later listed among the largest U.S. verdicts of 2023.

What happened next has to be stated just as plainly, because the verdict did not survive the year. The defendants moved for a new trial and for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, armed with declarations from two jurors. On December 12, 2023, Judge Nishimoto granted the motions and set the verdict aside in its entirety. He found the jury had reached a prohibited quotient verdict, with each juror writing down a number to be averaged rather than deliberating, and that another juror had concealed during jury selection a childhood loss that left her, in her own reported words during deliberations, resenting the defendants and wanting them to pay. He also found that plaintiffs' counsel had committed misconduct by eliciting causation testimony blocked by pretrial rulings and by urging the jury to send a message, an appeal to passion and prejudice. Beyond the misconduct, the court held the evidence insufficient to support the verdict and called the damages excessive, describing the $75 million punitive award as extraordinarily exaggerated and unconstitutional overkill.

Plaintiffs' counsel said they were confident the order was wrong on the law and the facts and would ask the California Court of Appeal to remedy it. As of this writing, no published appellate decision reinstating the verdict appears in the public record, so the case's honest status is a jury's $107 million answer wiped out by the trial court, with the fight over whether that answer counts still unresolved. Twelve years of litigation over one janitor's exposure, two trips through trial, and a verdict that exists on paper but not in any enforceable judgment: that is the record this page preserves.