A California appeals court confirmed this past week the conviction of Monsanto, owned by the German group Bayer, in the process initiated by a retiree suffering from cancer that he attributes to the use of the herbicide Roundup.
The San Francisco appeals court refused to review Edwin Hardeman’s case, as requested by Bayer, and upheld the group’s sentence to pay $ 25 million in damages and interest to the man. Hardeman, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2015, maintains that regular use of the glyphosate-based herbicide caused his illness.
The judges “upheld the district court’s ruling in favor of Edwin Hardeman in his action alleging that Monsanto’s Roundup pesticide caused his lymphoma,” the decision notes, recalling that “since 2015, thousands of cancer victims have brought Monsanto to court. both state and federal courts.”
Evidence showed that glyphosate’s carcinogenic risk was known
The ruling notes that the district court correctly denied Monsanto’s appeal “as evidence showed that glyphosate’s carcinogenic risk was known at the time of Hardeman’s exposure” to the product.
In a first appeal in July 2019, the compensation for the affected person was revised downwards. An initial ruling in March 2019 had awarded the plaintiff $ 80 million, a sum that was reduced to $ 25 million, $ 5 million for compensation and $ 20 million in punitive damages.
Edwin Hardeman was one of the first plaintiffs to bring Monsanto to justice, pointing to the herbicide it used for 25 years on its property to cause cancer, and accusing the Monsanto group of misleading users by claiming that glyphosate was harmless.
Monsanto always argued that no study concluded on the dangerousness of glyphosate and Roundup, which came onto the market in the 1970s. The Bayer group bought Monsanto in 2018 for $ 63 billion. The group was “disappointed” by the ruling on Friday and said it will continue to consider “all legal options, including taking the case to the Supreme Court.”
