By Tom Hals
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a $25 million judgment and trial verdict finding Bayer’s Roundup caused a California resident’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma, dealing a blow to the chemical company’s hopes of limiting its legal risk over the weed-killer.
The trial judge did not misapply the law when he allowed the lawsuit by Edwin Hardeman to go to trial, as Bayer has argued, according to a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
A jury in 2019 awarded Hardeman $5 million in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages. The punitive award was later cut to $20 million, and the appeals court also upheld the reduction.
The Hardeman case was the first so-called bellwether trial for federal cases alleging Roundup causes cancer.
Bayer has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides that dominate the market are safe for human use.
Bayer has committed $9.6 billion to settle 125,000 claims over Roundup and next week will seek preliminary approval for a $2 billion proposed deal to resolve future claims by consumers who have been exposed to Roundup but have not yet gotten sick.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Diane Craft and Dan Grebler)
