(Reuters) -Bayer was ordered on Friday to pay $2.25 billion to a Pennsylvania man who said he developed cancer from exposure to the company’s Roundup weedkiller, the man’s attorneys said.
A jury in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas found that John McKivision’s non-Hodgkins lymphoma was the result of using Roundup for yard work at his house for a period of several years. The verdict includes $250 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages.
“The jury’s punitive damages award sends a clear message that this multi-national corporation needs top to bottom change,” Tom Kline and Jason Itkin, McKivision’s attorneys, said in a joint statement.
That’s still crazy high for a single person. Imagine what this kind of penalty would to do an oil or tobacco company.
Almost like human life should be priceless. Huh…
Unless you are being sarcastic it is a pretty shitty take on the situation.
If ExxonMobil has this kind of penalty per person, they would have to pay $450 trillion dollars. Yes, they should go bankrupt, but this is literally 1000x their market cap.
If Boeing has this kind of penalty per person, they would have to pay $600 billion for just one of the 737 Max crashes. Which would completely bankrupt the company, giving Airbus a monopoly.
Yes, we do need larger penalties on corporations 99% of the time. It’s laughable how tech companies keep getting away with slaps on the wrist for grotesque privacy violations. But $2.25 billion for a single cancer case is a bridge too far. It should be somewhere around $2-15 million depending on the severity of the case, plus the people involved in the scandal should be fired.
However, the penalty should double with each appeal. Maybe that’s how they got to $2.25 billion.
if boeing cant be fucked to tighten bolts and have basic safety shit.
Or worse, they make necessary safety shit a expensive optional extra (ala the boeing crashes a couple years ago where the planes would nose dive randomly)
Then they deserve to go bankrupt.
They don’t deserve to exist as an entity if they are killing people with carelessness and greed.
Let some other group pick up the pieces in bankruptcy auctions.
The legal system routinely attaches prices to human lives and illnesses and it is almost never anything like two billion.