Monsanto may soon no longer be called “Monsanto,” with a name change already under way, but the damage and greed that Monsanto represents will not disappear. On Friday, a San Francisco jury awarded 46-year-old Dewayne Johnson $289 million in damages in his case against Monsanto. Johnson, who had been a school groundskeeper, contended that Monsanto’s herbicides RoundUp and Ranger Pro, caused the terminal case of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma he got when he was 42-years-old.
"The jury found Monsanto acted with malice and oppression because they knew what they were doing was wrong and doing it with reckless disregard for human life," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of Johnson's attorneys, according to the Associated Press.
Johnson was awarded $250 million in punitive damages and $39 million in compensatory damages as a jury agreed with his charge that Monsanto “failed to warn consumers about the alleged risk from their product.”
Monsanto has promoted the idea that there is scientific evidence on both sides, arguing that glyphosate—the acting agent in their herbicides—has been cleared by many in the scientific community. On the other hand, CNN reports, that the International Agency for Research on Cancer, using a “from 17 scientists,” found that “glyphosate was a probable cause of cancer in humans.” Johnson’s case is just the first of many more to come for the agricultural giant.
His case, expedited because of his declining health, was the first to go to trial of more than 4,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto in courts around the country. In San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria has allowed about 450 individual lawsuits to proceed against Monsanto — despite finding that the evidence of a link to cancer was “shaky” — and will let a few of them go to federal juries as test cases.
This is all coming at a time when big business has been winning bigly in the courts with “free speech” claims. As another California court, under U.S. District Judge William Shubb found that Monsanto does not need to have warning labels on their herbicides, arguing that the questions concerning whether or not glyphosate actually causes cancer are not answered in the affirmative and therefore it would be infringing on Monsanto’s free speech to force a label saying as much.
There will be more cases to come and more push back by Monsanto/Beyer.