Jurors in pollution trial shouldn’t have been told how rich pork execs are, judges rule
A federal appeals court overturned a jury’s multi-million-dollar verdict from Eastern North Carolina against the pork company Murphy Brown in a major hog farm pollution case on Thursday.
The judges ruled it was unfair to the Smithfield subsidiary that the jury knew how much the companies’ top executives are paid.
Specifically, a lawyer for the Bladen County residents who sued over the hog waste pollution said: “They willfully choose not to do anything about it ... but yet they pay $245 million to four people over four years. That’s the kind of money they can spend when they want to.”
In the end the jury awarded the neighbors of the Bladen County farm in question millions of dollars in punitive damages, according to the Food & Environment Reporting Network. However, the jury’s initial verdict was later reduced to $2.5 million because of a state law capping lawsuit damages.
But the judges on Thursday ordered the whole decision on punitive damages to be redone, this time with no mention of corporate finances or executive compensation.
When the jury heard about the millions of dollars the top executives make every year, the judges wrote, those jurors might have used that knowledge to “inappropriately ... decide how much money would be required for (Murphy Brown) to ‘feel’ the effect of the damages award.”
One of many hog farm lawsuits
There are numerous ongoing North Carolina lawsuits against Smithfield/Murphy Brown, not just the one the judges sent back on Thursday.
Farmers are allowed to store hog waste in “lagoons” that must be kept below a certain level. One common complaint is that the farmers then spray that mixture of feces, urine and other unsavory liquids into the air, harming their neighbors’ health and property values.
Some have also claimed additional public nuisances. The Bladen County neighbors in Thursday’s lawsuit, for example, complained of noisy trucks coming and going in the middle of the night, and piles of dead pigs stacked up and left to rot.
In multiple trials in recent years, juries have routinely decided that the company should be forced to pay Eastern North Carolina residents hundreds of millions of dollars over such claims.
But the large judgments against the company have been gradually whittled down in the courts, with Thursday’s ruling just the latest example.
And after the lawsuits began coming in, in 2017 and 2018 the Republican-led N.C. General Assembly changed state law to make similar legal challenges harder for people to win in the future.
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed both the 2017 and 2018 bills. He said that in addition to being unfair, the changes to those laws could also allow other types of pollution all around the state to go unpunished.
“Those same laws stopped the Tennessee Valley Authority from pumping air pollution into our mountains,” Cooper said in 2018, The News & Observer reported.
But both years the legislature overrode Cooper’s veto and passed the changes into law, despite his objections.
A separate lawsuit filed last year claims those new laws are unconstitutional.
A lesson from Charlotte’s Web?
One thing Thursday’s ruling didn’t do was wipe out all the damages against Smithfield in this case. The judges ruled that the 10 neighbors who sued in this case should still be given $75,000 each in what are called compensatory damages.
The only issue they ordered to be sent back was whether the neighbors deserve additional punitive damages, and if so how much.
There were three judges on the case: Stephanie Thacker, J. Harvey Wilkinson III and G. Steven Agee.
Thacker, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, wrote the main opinion in which all three of them agreed to invalidate the $2.5 million in punitive damages.
Agee, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush. wrote in a separate opinion that he would’ve preferred to throw out the entire verdict against Smithfield and make the neighbors sue all over again.
In addition to the salary information, he said no one should have been allowed to mention the fact that “a Chinese corporation (called WH Group) with $2 billion profits owned Murphy Brown,” Agee wrote, because it tainted the jurors’ views by exploiting an “anti-China bias.”
However, the other two judges did not agree with him that an entirely new trial was necessary.
Wilkinson, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, also wrote a separate opinion. He noted both the economic benefits of the hog industry and the “appalling conditions” on farms like the Bladen County operation in question — not just for the 14,000 hogs on the farm, he said, but also farm workers and anyone living nearby.
“It is past time to acknowledge the full harms that the unreformed practices of hog farming are inflicting,” he wrote, adding: “At the end of all this wreckage lies an uncomfortable truth: These nuisance conditions were unlikely to have persisted for long — or even to have arisen at all — had the neighbors of Kinlaw Farms been wealthier or more politically powerful.”
He ended by referencing a classic children’s book and urging large farms to improve their methods.
“Charlotte’s Web reminds us that all life is interconnected,” Wilkinson wrote. “And while not all pigs will be pardoned like Wilbur, it is fitting that the creatures who give their very lives for us, receive in return our efforts to make their brief stay on earth less intolerable. For their sake and for ours.”
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