Benicia School Groundskeeper Wins the First Roundup Cancer Verdict Against Monsanto

Dewayne "Lee" Johnson started with the Benicia Unified School District in June 2012 as a delivery driver and was quickly made the district's grounds integrated pest manager. The job meant spraying herbicide. He began with Roundup Pro and moved to Ranger Pro, a more concentrated Monsanto glyphosate product, which he mixed in a 50-gallon drum and sprayed from a truck-mounted rig across hillsides, parking lots, sports fields and school perimeters. During the school year he sprayed two to three hours each weekday, up to 150 gallons of Ranger Pro at a time, and in summer his crew sometimes went four or five hours. He wore a Tyvek suit, rubber gloves and boots, goggles and a paper mask, but about 80 percent of the time spray drifted onto his face, ears and neck.

In April 2014 the hose on his truck caught in a sidewalk gap and broke, shooting Ranger Pro inside his protective gear and soaking his skin, face, neck and head. A rash began within weeks. In October 2014 a dermatologist diagnosed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and the subtype turned out to be mycosis fungoides, one of the rarest forms of the disease. He was 42. Johnson called Monsanto's hotline in November 2014 and asked whether Roundup products could cause cancer. Someone took a statement; no one called back. He called again after a backpack sprayer leaked onto his back. Again, no answer. Lesions, plaques and nodules eventually covered much of his body, and by the time of trial he had been told he had a short time to live.

Johnson sued Monsanto in San Francisco Superior Court in January 2016 and received a trial preference because of his prognosis. The case was tried before Judge Suzanne Ramos Bolanos in the summer of 2018. The Court of Appeal's opinion lists his counsel as Michael J. Miller, Curtis G. Hoke and Jeffrey A. Travers of The Miller Firm, R. Brent Wisner and Pedram Esfandiary of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, and Mark E. Burton of Audet & Partners. On August 10, 2018, the third day of deliberations, the jury found for Johnson on strict liability and negligent failure to warn and on design defect, and found that Monsanto had acted with malice. It awarded about $39.25 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages.

Judge Bolanos issued a tentative ruling that would have thrown out the punitive award, then reversed course. In an October 22, 2018 order she upheld the finding of corporate malice but held that due process required a one-to-one ratio, cutting punitive damages to $39.25 million and the total to $78.5 million. Johnson accepted the remittitur rather than retry the case.

Monsanto appealed and Johnson cross-appealed. On July 20, 2020, the First District Court of Appeal, in an opinion by Presiding Justice Humes, rejected Monsanto's preemption, causation and evidentiary arguments and affirmed the liability and malice findings. It held, however, that the $33 million the jury awarded for future noneconomic loss could not stand when the evidence at trial gave Johnson roughly two years to live, and reduced that component to $4 million. That brought compensatory damages to $10,253,209.32, and the court reduced punitive damages to the same figure to preserve the one-to-one ratio, for a total of about $20.5 million. Both sides petitioned the California Supreme Court, which denied review on October 21, 2020. Bayer, which had bought Monsanto in 2018, chose not to seek review in the United States Supreme Court and paid Johnson the $20.5 million late in 2020. Johnson's case was the first of the Roundup cancer cases to reach a jury, and the verdict opened the path for the tens of thousands of claims that followed.