Johnson
& Johnson gained a major victory in defending its subsidiary DePuy. The behomoth corporation succesfully defended at trial an Illinois woman’s claim
she was harmed by a defectively designed metal-on-metal hip implant. The case
is Strum v. DePuy, 2011-L-9352, Circuit Court of Cook County (Chicago).
The jury of seven women and five men
in state court in Chicago deliberated for slightly more than a day before
returning its verdict in favor of DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. Plaintiff Carol
Strum’s lawyers had asked the jury for an award of at least $5 million.
Jurors
had sent a note during the deliberations to Cook County Circuit Judge Deborah
Mary Dooling, who presided over the five-week trial, asking if they must be
unanimous in their verdict. It appears that the jurors could not reach a
unanimous verdict as polling of the panel after the verdict revealed that four
jurors wanted to side with the injured Plaintiff.
Strum’s
case was the second to go trial of almost 11,000 filed in the United States.
The J&J unit was hit with a $8.3 million verdict in compensatory damages by
a Los Angeles jury that found the design of its ASR XL hip implant was
defective and that the company had properly warned of associated risks. The
jury rejected punitive damages in that case.
Johnson
& Johnson, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is the world’s
largest seller of health-care products. J&J
recalled the implants in August 2010 after an estimated 93,000 were sold because it said 12
percent failed within five years. Data last year showed 44 percent failed in Australia
within seven years. Analysts have said the cases could cost J&J billions of
dollars.
Details
of the Case
The
Plaintiff, Carol, Strum, was a 54-year-old nurse, who had an ASR XL implanted
in her in 2008. It was replaced three years later. While her attorneys told
jurors the chromium and cobalt implant shed metal into her body, poisoning
tissue and sending metal ions into her blood stream, defense lawyers argued
Strum had a hyper-sensitivity to the implant and that she got no pain relief
when it was replaced with a different device. Defense attorneys also argued
that DePuy’s product was not defectively designed.
Needless
to say, the jury rejected Strum’s request that they impose punitive damages.
About
500 of the cases against DePuy are pending in Illinois. It is expected that at
least one more case in Illinois will try this year
The verdicts are now
evened up: one for the plaintiffs and one for the defendants in the
"Bellwether
Trials". The Bellwether Trials are designed to gauge the
settlement ranges on the remaining 11,000
cases still pending. Since each
side already has a victory under its belt, there is sure to be more
cases
brought in front of juries to see exactly where the public's perception is as
to DePuy's liability
in the timing of the recall.
