Sonoma County Man's Roundup Cancer Case Ends in $25.3 Million Judgment After an $80 Million Verdict

Edwin Hardeman lived on a large property in Sonoma County, California, and from the 1980s until 2012 he regularly sprayed Monsanto's Roundup weed killer to control weeds and poison oak. In 2015 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He sued Monsanto in 2016 under California law, claiming the company knew of studies linking glyphosate, Roundup's active ingredient, to cancer and never put a warning on the label. His case was folded into the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation in San Francisco and chosen as the first bellwether trial.

Judge Vince Chhabria split the trial in two at Monsanto's request. In the first phase the six-person jury heard only the science. On March 19, 2019, it unanimously found that Roundup exposure was a substantial factor in causing Hardeman's lymphoma. In the second phase the jury heard evidence about Monsanto's conduct, including internal emails about the company's approach to safety questions and its relationships at the Environmental Protection Agency. On March 27, 2019, the jury found Monsanto liable for failure to warn, negligence, and design defect, found that it acted with malice or oppression, and awarded $5,267,634.10 in compensatory damages, about $3.1 million for past pain and suffering, $2 million for future pain and suffering, and $200,967 in past medical expenses, plus $75 million in punitive damages. The total verdict was $80,267,634.10.

Hardeman was represented at trial by Aimee Wagstaff and David Wool of Andrus Wagstaff PC of Lakewood, Colorado, and Jennifer Moore of Moore Law Group in Louisville, Kentucky. Monsanto's trial team was led by Brian Stekloff of Wilkinson Walsh. After the verdict, Hardeman and his wife thanked the jurors and the two firms at a press conference outside the courthouse.

Monsanto moved for judgment as a matter of law and a new trial and, in the alternative, to cut the damages. On July 15, 2019, Judge Chhabria refused to disturb the liability verdict or the compensatory award but held that the $75 million punitive award, roughly 15 times the compensatory damages, was constitutionally excessive under the Supreme Court's due process guideposts. He wrote that Monsanto deserved to be punished for being more concerned with tamping down safety inquiries than with making sure its product was safe, but that the record did not show intentional concealment of a known risk. He reduced punitive damages to $20 million, about 3.8 times the compensatory award, and entered judgment for $25,267,634.10.

Monsanto appealed, arguing among other things that the federal pesticide statute preempted the California failure-to-warn claim, that the expert causation testimony should have been excluded, and that even $20 million in punitive damages was too much. Hardeman cross-appealed the reduction. On May 14, 2021, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment in full. It held that FIFRA did not preempt the state-law duty to warn, that the causation experts were properly admitted, that the jury's finding of malice was supported, and that the reduced $20 million punitive award sat within constitutional limits. One judge on the panel would have cut punitive damages further. David Wool argued the appeal for Hardeman, joined on the briefs by Aimee Wagstaff, Jennifer Moore, and Leslie Brueckner of Public Justice.

Monsanto, by then owned by Bayer, asked the Supreme Court to take the case. The solicitor general recommended against review, and on June 21, 2022, the Court denied certiorari, leaving the $25,267,634.10 judgment final. The Hardeman verdict was the first federal jury finding that Roundup causes cancer and, together with two California state verdicts, preceded Bayer's 2020 announcement that it would pay roughly $10 billion to settle most pending Roundup claims.