Washington State Judge Denies Monsanto’s Request to Reduce Punitive Damages in Toxic Tort Case

Plaintiffs sued Pharmacia LLC (“Pharmacia”), a corporate spinoff and successor of Monsanto, for producing polychlorinated biphenyls (“PCBs”) in the Sky Valley Education Center (“SVEC”) in Washington state. The plaintiffs alleged that PCBs used in the fluorescent lighting and caulk of SVEC caused their cognitive and hormonal health conditions and that Monsanto knew of the dangers of PCBs yet continued to produce these dangerous chemicals.

At trial, the jury awarded the plaintiffs an aggregate total of $25M in compensatory damages and $75M in punitive damages.

In addition to this $100M verdict, Pharmacia is also the subject of several other PCB-related verdicts, resulting in the company owing over a billion dollars to victims. To avoid payment, Pharmacia sought to offset the $75M punitive damages award, proffering multiple arguments before Judge Michael K. Ryan of the King County Superior Court. However, Pharmacia’s efforts failed. On May 28, 2025, Judge Ryan denied Pharmacia’s motion to strike, fully offset or remit the jury’s punitive damages award. Judge Ryan upheld the award for essentially three reasons.

First, the court rejected Pharmacia’s constitutional due process challenge to the punitive damages award. In essence, Pharmacia had argued that Pharmacia/Monsanto was being punished unfairly because it was already the subject of multiple punitive damages awards in other cases it had lost. However, the court was not persuaded as Pharmacia could have, but chose not to, consolidate all of the actions earlier in the litigation.

Second, the court overruled Pharmacia’s contention that under a Missouri law, the punitive damages award in this case should be offset against punitive damages awards in the other cases which involved the same conduct. The court found that Pharmacia did not meet its burden under the Missouri law for two reasons. First, the law required that the previous awards for punitive damages to have already been paid. Pharmacia had not yet paid any such punitive damages to avail itself to the Missouri law. Second, and more importantly, the court found that “Monsanto acted unreasonably in continuing to market and sell the forever chemical PCBs to various manufacturers, without adequate warnings about the human health effects of PCBs or full disclosure to those manufacturers of all information in its possession regarding the impacts of PCBs on human health, for decades after it acquired actual knowledge about the dangerous nature of its product.”

Last, the court considered Pharmacia’s attempt to throw out the punitive damages through remittitur because, according to Pharmacia, the punitive damages awards were “grossly excessive individually and because they [were] arbitrary.” However, the court disagreed, finding that the ratio between the compensatory damages and punitive damages was constitutionally permissible. Indeed, the court described in great detail Monsanto’s decades-long corporate malfeasance, including but not limited to lying to its customers, which justified the jury’s award of punitive damages against Pharmacia.

The case is Gunnar L.G. Rose et al v. Pharmacia LLC, No. 18-2-58239-3 in the King County Superior Court.