Philadelphia Jury Awards Indiana Woman $12.5 Million Over Ethicon Prolift Pelvic Mesh Implant

Patricia Hammons, an Indiana woman who worked stocking shelves at a Walmart, was implanted with Ethicon's Prolift pelvic mesh kit in 2009 to treat pelvic organ prolapse. The device was made by Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, and sold from its launch in 2005 until it was pulled from the market in 2012.

After the implant, Hammons had sharp pain during intercourse and stopped having sex. In 2012 a urogynecologist traced her symptoms to the mesh, and over three surgeries he cut mesh out of her vaginal wall and her bladder, where it had worked into the bladder wall, and repaired two holes in her bladder. She was left with ongoing incontinence and a shortened, scarred vagina, and she has abstained from sex because of the pain.

She sued in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, and her case went to trial in late 2015 as the first pelvic mesh trial against Ethicon in that court. It ran about two and a half weeks. Her lawyers argued that the Prolift was defectively designed and that Ethicon had not given patients or doctors an adequate warning. Her expert witnesses, a gynecologist and a urogynecologist, testified that the design was defective.

The jury heard that Ethicon knew before the product launched that mesh implants could cause pain during sex, yet the risk was not made clear in the product's instructions for use or in patient brochures. An Ethicon engineer acknowledged on the stand that the company had never developed a procedure for removing the mesh, even though it knew implants could fail. Shanin Specter of Kline & Specter told the Philadelphia Inquirer after the verdict that every American depends on Johnson & Johnson to put safety ahead of selling. Ethicon's lawyer told jurors the company had made mistakes but argued that its employees never meant to cause harm.

On December 22, 2015, the jury returned a verdict of $12.5 million: $5.5 million in compensatory damages and $7 million in punitive damages. The trial court then added delay damages calculated on the compensatory award only, which brought the total judgment to $12,850,945.18.

Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson appealed. Charles L. Becker argued for Hammons, and on June 19, 2018, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the judgment. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court took the case on the question of whether Pennsylvania courts could exercise jurisdiction over the New Jersey defendants for an Indiana plaintiff's injury. On October 21, 2020, it ruled 6 to 1 that they could, because Ethicon had been involved in the production in Pennsylvania of the mesh Hammons claimed injured her.