Supreme Court rejects Monsanto appeal

The Supreme Court rejected Monsanto’s appeal Tuesday of a San Francisco federal court jury’s $25.2 million damage award to a Bay Area man who was diagnosed with cancer after spraying Roundup, the world’s most widely used herbicide, on his crops for 26 years.

Edwin Hardeman’s case was the first of thousands of lawsuits nationwide by cancer victims to go to trial in federal court. Monsanto, now a subsidiary of the Germany pharmaceutical company Bayer AG, told the Supreme Court it was a “bellwether trial” whose results “will influence thousands of others.”

David Frederick, a lawyer for Hardeman, said his client “has gotten justice” with the court’s final action in his case.

Bayer said it was disappointed but would contest liability in cases pending elsewhere, while setting aside $6.5 billion for future settlements and legal costs.

The case also led to a turnabout in the federal government’s policy on the herbicide. While the Justice Department under President Donald Trump sided with Monsanto in the case, President Biden’s Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to reject the company’s appeal, saying — as Hardeman’s jury found — that Monsanto could have warned users of the potential dangers of its product, even though the company denied any such dangers.

And although the Environmental Protection Agency has approved glyphosate products as safe since 1991, the EPA has now proposed allowing California to place a cancer-warning label on Roundup sold in the state, as long as the label also notes the EPA’s own safety findings. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as a likely cause of human cancer in 2015, and California health officials sought to attach a warning label in 2018 but were blocked by a federal judge.

Bayer has announced that it is replacing glyphosate with another active ingredient in Roundup sales for U.S. home and garden use, starting next year, while continuing to sell the current version of the product for agricultural use.

Hardeman, now 73, sprayed Roundup on weeds at his home in Gualala and later on poison oak at his 56-acre property in Santa Rosa. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a sometimes-fatal lymph cancer, in 2015. After four years of chemotherapy and other treatment, doctors told him the disease was in remission but that he faced an increased risk of cancer in the future.

After finding that Roundup was a “substantial cause” of Hardeman’s cancer, the jury awarded him $5.2 million for economic losses, pain and suffering and emotional distress in July 2019 and also assessed $75 million in punitive damages for selling a product that the manufacturer knew, or should have known, was unsafe. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria reduced the punitive damages to $20 million, citing Supreme Court rulings limiting