$502 million jury verdict against metal-on-metal hip maker DePuy
March 21st, 2016 by Cutter Law
On March 17th, a federal jury ordered Johnson & Johnson and DePuy to pay an historic $502 million verdict to five plaintiffs who had all received a faulty, metal-on-metal DePuy Pinnacle hip implant.
The nine-person jury found DePuy and its parent company Johnson & Johnson liable for design defect, failure to warn, fraud, and gross negligence. The verdict included $365 million in punitive damages. The case (MDL 3:11-md-02244) was presided over by Judge Ed Kinkeade.
The verdict was the culmination of nine weeks of trial and a week of jury deliberations in Dallas. This bellwether trial saw the cases of patients “Margaret Aoki, Jay Christopher, Donald Greer, Richard Klusmann and Robert Peterson, all Texas residents who received DePuy’s Pinnacle Acetabular Cup System hip implant” and suffered severe pain, bone and tissue loss, inflammation and other serious problems due to the failure of those implants.
Reuters notes that DePuy previously paid $2.5 billion to settle more than 7000 lawsuits based on another of its hip replacement systems, the ASR. It also notes that Johnson & Johnson’s share price fell 0.6 percent on the day of this jury verdict.
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