ST. LOUIS — The law firms that won all three of their Roundup trials against Monsanto are considering challenging the $10.9 billion weed killer settlement announced last week.
The class-action settlement was negotiated between Monsanto owner Bayer AG and a small team of lawyers who previously were at the forefront of the Roundup litigation, sources told U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit investigative research group.
But 30,000 plaintiffs remain who are not included in the deal, which would end only about 95,000 of the 125,000 lawsuits claiming the weed killer caused plaintiffs to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of blood cancer.
The deal would allow Bayer, which inherited Roundup with its purchase of St. Louis-based Monsanto in 2018, to continue selling the weed killer in the U.S. without any safety warning, and plaintiffs’ attorneys who settled their case inventories agreed to stop taking new Roundup clients.
“It’s basically depriving a plaintiff of their constitutional right to a jury trial,” one of the sources said.
Under the proposed settlement, the issue of whether glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is carcinogenic would be left to a five-member “science panel,” not a jury.
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