$495M verdict shows what happens when St. Louis juries go nuclear

Earlier this summer, a jury in the city of St. Louis ordered Abbott Laboratories to pay almost half a billion dollars after finding that a baby formula produced by Abbott caused a preemie to develop a debilitating disease.

The plaintiff, Margo Gill, is the mother of Robynn Davis. After being given Similac infant formula at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital shortly after being born in August 2021, Robynn developed necrotizing enterocolitis, a severe inflammation of the bowels which leads to a “bacterial invasion” and, according to the National Institutes of Health, can have a mortality rate as high as 50 percent. For Robynn, it caused a brain injury, leaving her with cerebral palsy. Now three years old, she can’t walk or talk and needs to use a feeding tube. Gill’s suit contended that the medical tragedy began with the formula.

The jury agreed, ordering Abbott to pay $95 million in compensatory damages to Gill in addition to a $400 million punitive penalty.

Those numbers are just the latest eye-popping verdicts levied by St. Louis juries against large—and not so large—corporations accused of wrongdoing.

In 2018, a city jury hit Johnson & Johnson with a $4.69 billion verdict over claims that their talcum powder causes ovarian cancer. In 2022, a city jury ordered Hyatt Regency to pay $177 million in damages to a New Jersey woman sexually assaulted by a security guard who used a master key to enter her room. That same year, in two separate cases, city juries hit Ford Motor Company with a $6 million and a $10 million verdict as a result of suits brought by a mechanic and a manufacturing company worker and their families alleging that exposure to asbestos in the cars’ brake dust led to mesothelioma. Last week, a St. Louis jury awarded $3 million to a man shot by a security guard outside a gas station on Tucker.

Because of these cases and others, juries in the city of St. Louis are accruing something of a reputation. Missouri Lawyers Weekly reported that the state saw 15 verdicts of $10 million or more in 2023, which are sometimes called nuclear verdicts. That was a 50 percent increase from 2022, and three of those came from St. Louis city. The American Tort Reform Foundation currently ranks St. Louis eighth nationally on its list of so-called “judicial hellholes.” The report accompanying the list describes the city as allowing junk science into the courtroom and letting plaintiffs skirt state and federal law.

Because of this, the foundation claims, out-of-state plaintiffs are “flocking” to the city for favorable treatment.

Attorney Jack Garvey, of Stranch, Jennings & Garvey, who litigated the Abbott Labs case on behalf of Margot Gill, says that the annual “hellhole” rankings are just spin driven by monied interests.

“Just because they don’t like high verdicts, it’s a hellhole,” Garvey says. “Anything that a corporation can do to cover up their conduct, they will take it. It’s like the shiny, bright thing that they want everyone to see and be distracted by.”

Juries tasked with deciding these civil cases operate under different rules than juries in criminal cases. Only nine out of 12 members need to agree in order to render a verdict (and in the Abbott case, that’s all that did). And though plaintiffs’ attorneys can suggest dollar amounts, the size of the award is entirely up to the jury. It doesn’t all go to the person suing. Half of all punitive damages go into a state fund to compensate people injured by negligent or reckless parties unable to provide compensation (for instance, someone who is hit by an uninsured motorist).

Garvey says that his team didn’t suggest a dollar amount in the Abbott case. “We just said, ‘Just do what you think is right, and we’ll send a message.’ The only way you send a message to a corporation is through the pocketbook. It’s got to be a big number to get their attention.”

One idea used to explain jury behavior is the reptile theory. It holds that if attorneys representing the allegedly injured party in a suit can paint the defendant—often a large, rich, and faceless corporation—as a danger to the community, perhaps even to the jurors themselves, it will appeal to the jurors’ primal tendencies to defend themselves and their community against the threat.

“When it is used effectively, and I have certainly seen a number of instances where it is used effectively, jurors tend to disregard the science and decide that they need to punish the defendant with a huge verdict,” attorney Booker Shaw, who was among the lawyers representing Abbott Labs, said on St. Louis on the Air last week.

He added, “Here, of course, it was even more effective…because you’re talking about a severely injured baby.”

Garvey disagrees.

“It’s not the reptile theory,” he says. “It’s not emotion, because all that’s cleaned up in jury selection. You can’t rule on emotion, and the jurors know that. It’s based on evidence.”

Garvey says that one piece of evidence that was probably particularly persuasive was a 2019 document in which Abbott seemed to acknowledge that a primary risk factor for necrotizing enterocolitis was the use of baby formula. During the trial, Garvey and his legal team questioned the doctor in charge of Cardinal Glennon’s NICU. “We showed him the document [and asked], ‘Did they provide you with this and tell you of the severity?’ And he said, ‘No.’ Would that have been good to know? ‘Absolutely.’”

“Abbott was trying to take over the baby formula market,” says Garvey. “And their own internal documents say, you start in the NICU. Own the NICU, own the market.”

Garvey says that he likes trying cases in front of St. Louis juries not because they’re emotional or because they have any exceptional animosity toward rich companies, but because the jurors “are not swayed by corporate tactics and evasion and equivocations.”

Though the news media spreads the word of half-billion dollar verdicts far and wide, the arduous appeals processes that typically follow are less appealing stories. The $4.69 billion verdict against Johnson and Johnson, for instance, was knocked down to $2.1 billion in an appeals process that lasted more than two years. The $20 million Ford asbestos case was successfully appealed and ended in a settlement for an undisclosed sum.

The long and winding appeals process notwithstanding, another city jury could be on the cusp of a headline-making verdict this week. Closing arguments are expected Thursday in a trial against Wabash National, a company that makes billions a year manufacturing, among other things, semi-truck trailers. (The trial is streaming on Courtroom View Network.) The lawsuit stems from a May 2019 car crash on Interstate 55 near downtown, in which a Volkswagen sedan collided with the back of a trailer and then slid under it, killing both passengers, Taron Tailor and Nicholas Perkins, both young fathers.

At the heart of the trial is the trailer’s rear impact guard, the bumper that hangs down from the trailer and theoretically prevents cars from sliding beneath the trailer (known as underriding) when they collide into their back. The suit alleges that Wabash sold rear impact guards that the company knew prevented underriding only when the cars colliding into them were traveling at relatively slow speeds. The plaintiffs’ attorney argued in his opening that even though the guard may have met regulatory requirements, those requirements were unduly influenced by the influence of big companies like Wabash.

“We’ve worked years to get here, years to get this case into a public courtroom, so that you all should decide what should be done,” attorney Johnny Simon said at the top of his opening argument last week. Simon, along with his father John, represents the families of the two men. “The decisions you make in this case can make a real difference.”