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Sometimes, the US Justice system actually makes a favorable judgment for American citizens. Yesterday, the First Appellate District of California denied two separate hearings for Monsanto.
The first request that was obliterated was that Monsanto wanted a rehearing in the DeWayne Johnson case. Johnson was the first person to sue Monsanto two years ago because he contracted cancer due to using the weedkiller RoundUp over a long period of time. In 2018, Johnson won a jury trial of $289 million because Monsanto did not place a warning label on their product in the USA even though they place warning labels on their products in other countries. However, the trial judge knocked that down to $78 million because of excessive punitive damages.
Bayer, the current owner of Monsanto, appealed this decision to the aforementioned appellate court in California last year. The appellate court ruled in favor of Johnson, but lowered the amount of damages down to $20.5 million in July. Instead of paying that amount, Monsanto asked for a rehearing to take $4 million off because the assumption was that Johnson was going to die soon because of their product. It’s ironic that Monsanto tried to claim their products were not harmful and then saying that their product will kill him in a couple of years. Fortunately, this request was thrown out.
The second request that the appellate court rejected was that Monsanto wanted for the court to end a state-wide ban on one of the pesticides that they sell called dicamba. The problem with dicamba is that the pesticide drifts to adjacent fields when sprayed. If two farms are next to each other and one farmer sprays dicamba, then the pesticide kills all of the other farmer’s crops and fruits.
These two decisions were definitely no-brainers by the appellate court in California. However, Monsanto still has the option to appeal both of these judgments to the US Supreme Court. Since Bayer and Monsanto are playing the waiting game, they will eventually appeal.
