Largest Personal Injury Verdicts Never Collected of 2002

Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.

A Baltimore jury awarded Catonsville businessman Scott Steele $276 million after finding that First Union National Bank defrauded his settlement-services company and used his proprietary technology to build a competing business projected to generate $2.4 billion in profits.

In January 1995 a Metra commuter train pulled away from the Winnetka station with a 20-year-old violinist's case strap caught in the doors and dragged her about 366 feet, costing her a leg. A Cook County jury found the railroad and Metra at fault in 1999, and the verdict was affirmed on appeal in 2001. The railroads paid $35 million in March 2002, which included interest on the judgment.

A Warren County jury awarded $27,335,667.87 after a Monarch Environmental garbage truck parked illegally on a rural Kentucky road put a 17-year-old in a coma for 57 days and left her with permanent brain damage.

A Miami jury awarded $37.5 million in gross compensatory damages to John Lukacs, a 76-year-old attorney who developed bladder and oral cancer after three decades of heavy smoking. The trial court later entered a reduced judgment of about $24.8 million, which the Third District Court of Appeal affirmed.

A freight train broadsided a car carrying an Illinois couple and their adult daughter at a malfunctioning railroad crossing in Bloomingdale in January 2001, after a Canadian National/Illinois Central dispatcher mistakenly lifted the safety stop-and-flag order protecting the crossing. Fidel and Francisca Velarde each suffered permanent traumatic brain injuries that left them needing round-the-clock supervision. A Cook County jury found the two railroads and the driver at fault and awarded the Velardes a combined $21 million as part of a $55 million verdict that also covered their daughter's injuries and her husband's loss-of-consortium claim. The Illinois Appellate Court, First District, affirmed the verdict in full in 2004, rejecting the railroads' bid for a new trial or reduced damages.

William Whitehurst won a $44.7 million judgment against the United States after doctors at Sheppard Air Force Base Hospital made delivery decisions that destroyed 65 to 70 percent of an infant boy's brain tissue; because FTCA claims are tried to the court, a judge entered the award, and the Fifth Circuit later capped recovery at $20 million under the FTCA administrative-claim limit.

On October 4, 2002, a Los Angeles jury ordered Philip Morris to pay Betty Bullock, a 64-year-old Newport Beach woman dying of lung cancer after 45 years of smoking the company's cigarettes, $28 billion in punitive damages on top of $850,000 in compensatory damages. It remains the largest verdict ever returned for a single plaintiff in U.S. history. The trial court remitted the punitive award to $28 million, Bullock died in February 2003, the punitive award was reversed on appeal in 2008, and on retrial in 2009 a second jury awarded $13.8 million, which the Court of Appeal affirmed in 2011. Michael J. Piuze tried the case; he died in 2020, and this page documents the case as part of the public record.

A federal jury awarded $10.2 million to the Trull family after finding Volkswagen negligent for equipping the rear bench of a 1986 Vanagon with lap-only belts, a design that contributed to one child's death and two severe brain injuries in a 1991 New Hampshire crash.

In 1972, an eight-year-old girl spent months in her family's Montgomery County, Maryland basement while her father applied and sanded a Georgia-Pacific joint compound during a home renovation. She developed mesothelioma decades later and died at 34, shortly after a jury awarded her and her husband $9,188,000, including $4,800,000 in non-economic damages. Georgia-Pacific appealed on causation and on whether Maryland's 1986 cap on non-economic damages limited the award. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed, and the Court of Appeals of Maryland affirmed again on June 11, 2002, holding that the cap did not apply because her exposure ended before the cap took effect.

George Sink, P.A. Injury Lawyers attorneys E. Alan Kennington and Ellen McCloy won a judgment reforming a commercial trucking policy so that client Francis Clark Antley, a trucker seriously hurt in a hit-and-run, could pursue up to $1 million in uninsured motorist coverage instead of the $15,000 minimum the insurer claimed applied. The South Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed in a published 2002 opinion, Antley v. Nobel Insurance Co., holding the insurer never made a meaningful offer of additional UM coverage.

After a Federal Signal flasher on a Minneapolis police van disabled the brake-shift interlock and the van surged into a Holidazzle Parade crowd, killing two and injuring nine, James R. Schwebel and James S. Ballentine of Schwebel, Goetz and Sieben won a precedent-setting appeal holding that a self-insured municipality must pay no-fault benefits independent of the municipal tort liability cap.