DOVER, Del. – In a significant development, a Delaware judge declared a mistrial on Friday in the latest lawsuit claiming that the widely-used weedkiller Roundup is linked to cancer. The declaration came after the jury informed the court that they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict after deliberating for three days. Judge Vivian Medinilla subsequently urged the jurors to continue their discussions, but they remained deadlocked.
The lawsuit was filed by the family of Anthony Cloud, a former landscaper from South Carolina who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2018. Tragically, Cloud passed away in October 2021, just six weeks after initiating the legal action. Seeking $142 million in punitive damages, the family’s case went to trial in Wilmington at the start of February.
Since acquiring Monsanto, the St. Louis-based agribusiness giant that produces Roundup, in 2018, German chemical company Bayer AG has faced tens of thousands of lawsuits. Notably, in January, a Philadelphia jury ordered Bayer to pay a striking $2.3 billion to a man diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using Roundup for two decades. This verdict stands as the largest in the ongoing litigations surrounding the herbicide. It follows a November ruling in Missouri that required Bayer to pay over $1.5 billion in damages to three plaintiffs. In 2019, Bayer was also ordered by a Californian jury to pay $2 billion, though the amount was later reduced to $87 million by a judge.
In 2020, Bayer set aside more than $10 billion to settle approximately 125,000 Roundup lawsuits. Nevertheless, thousands more cases remained unresolved. Although the company encountered a series of favorable trial outcomes in 2021, it started facing legal setbacks last year, as juries began awarding massive sums of money to the plaintiffs, often exceeding nine or ten figures. For example, a California jury ordered Bayer to pay $332 million in a Roundup lawsuit in 2021, but the amount was subsequently reduced to $28 million by a judge.
Similar to previous legal actions, the plaintiffs in the Delaware case argued that Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup, negligently designed the product and failed to adequately warn users about its potential health risks.
This lawsuit also comes in the wake of Bayer’s agreement in June to pay nearly $7 million to settle allegations made by New York’s attorney general that Monsanto had made false and misleading statements about the safety of Roundup.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in 2022 directed the Environmental Protection Agency to re-evaluate its 2020 conclusion that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, does not present a health risk to individuals exposed to it.
The mistrial ruling in Delaware marks another important chapter in the ongoing controversial saga surrounding Roundup and its alleged link to cancer.