Philadelphia Jury Awards $78M in Roundup Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Lawsuit

A Philadelphia jury has ordered Bayer’s Monsanto subsidiary to pay a man $3 million in compensation and $75 million in punitive damages, after concluding that years of exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis.

The verdict was announced on October 10, after a nearly month-long trial involving a lawsuit filed by William Melissen, who used the glyphosate-based weed killer around his home and commercially from 1992 to 2020. The jury took less than three hours of deliberations to reach a decision in Melissen’s favor.

Bayer and its Monsanto subsidiary have faced more than 120,000 Roundup non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma lawsuits over the last decade, each involving allegations that they failed to disclose the side effects associated with the weed killer’s active ingredient, glyphosate.

The claims all involve similar evidence, indicating that the manufacturers knew about the potential cancer risks linked to Roundup for years, but failed to provide adequate warnings to farmers, landscapers and homeowners who were exposed to the herbicide on a regular basis.

Juries in various venues have already hit Bayer and Monsanto with billions in cumulative judgments, and the manufacturers have agreed to pay more than $10 billion in Roundup settlements. However, thousands of claims continue to move forward throughout the U.S. court system.

Melissen’s lawsuit was the sixth to go to trial in Pennsylvania state court. Plaintiffs have won four of those cases, while Monsanto has only won two.

In December 2023, a Philadelphia Roundup lawsuit ended in a $3.4 million verdict, including millions in punitive damages awarded after the jury found that Monsanto needlessly endangered consumers. Only one month later, another Philadelphia jury awarded $2.2 billion in damages in a lawsuit filed by a landscaper diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was later reduced to $400 million by the state court judge presiding over the trial.

Immediately before the verdict in Melissen’s case, a Roundup lawsuit filed by Ryan Young ended in a defense verdict last month.

Monsanto Intends To Appeal Roundup Lawsuit Losses

After this latest trial result, as it has done after every jury loss, Monsanto indicated that it plans to file an appeal, maintaining that the evidence does not support the jury’s award, and that errors were made during the trial.

The company is currently pursuing a number of appeals in other Roundup non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma lawsuits, resting its defense strategy on a potential review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Monsanto hopes this review will find that the state-court based failure to warn lawsuits are preempted by federal law, since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prohibited it from adding cancer warning labels to Roundup products.

Early in the litigation, a number of judges rejected this argument. However, the prospects for appealing the Roundup lawsuits to the U.S. Supreme Court changed in August 2024, when the U.S. District Court for the Third Circuit agreed Roundup cases were preempted by federal law, conflicting with the earlier decisions returned by other courts.

To resolve the now contradictory rulings, the companies have indicated they intend to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. However, it is unclear whether the highest appeals court in the country will agree to even consider the issue.

In the meantime, to limit liability from Roundup lawsuit failure to warn claims, Bayer and Monsanto have announced they are removing glyphosate from their Roundup consumer products, while keeping the active ingredient as a part of their formulation for large agricultural users. Despite the move, it is still expected that Bayer will continue to face a steady stream of trials for years to come, unless it is able to successfully convince the Supreme Court to take up the case and rule in its favor.