Punitive Damages

One of California's largest for-profit insurers stopped a controversial practice of canceling sick policyholders Friday after a judge ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it dropped in the middle of chemotherapy. The ruling by a private arbitration judge was the first of its kind and the most powerful rebuke to the state's major insurers whose cancellation practices are under fire from the courts, state regulators and elected officials.

Nearly 19 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill fouled Alaska's Prince William Sound, the Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether the world's largest oil company must pay a record $2.5 billion in punitive damages. The eight justices who heard the case appeared closely split, although several of them said they were looking for a way to reduce the size of the award. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sat out the case because he is an Exxon stockholder.

A Los Angeles judge has wiped out most of a jury verdict awarding millions of dollars to Nicaraguan field hands who applied pesticides to Dole Food Co. crops and who are now sterile. Although the decision leaves four workers with $1.58 million, it will undercut claims of an estimated 6,000 others who have sued in the United States for similar injuries suffered outside of this country. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria G. Chaney overturned jury verdicts in the first U.S.

A Los Angeles jury Tuesday awarded at least $371 million in damages to a satellite company in a dispute against Boeing Co. over canceled plans for a satellite network that could beam television programming and other services to mobile-device users around the globe. ICO Global Communications, whose chairman is cellular phone billionaire Craig McCaw, accused Boeing of thwarting its plans to build the network.

Boeing Co. on Friday was slapped with $236 million in punitive damages by a Los Angeles jury in a dispute over canceled plans to build a satellite telecommunications network. The damages came on top of at least $371 million in compensatory damages that was awarded Oct. 21 to ICO Global Communications, whose chairman is cellular phone billionaire Craig McCaw. Boeing, whose satellite-making business in El Segundo was at the center of the dispute, said it would appeal the verdict.

Sexual abuse victims of a defrocked priest can seek punitive damages from the Diocese of San Diego in a lawsuit that alleges officials knew the priest was abusive and did not protect them, a judge ruled Tuesday. Former priest Edward Anthony Rodrigue was convicted of sexual abuse of children and has admitted to molesting five or six boys a year over 15 years. Twenty people claim in a lawsuit against the San Diego diocese that Rodrigue, 69, abused them in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday put new limits on large verdicts intended to punish corporate wrongdoers when it overturned a $79-million punitive jury award against cigarette maker Philip Morris. In a 5-4 opinion, the court said companies could not be punished for harm they might have inflicted on thousands of people based on a lawsuit brought on behalf of one person. Justice Stephen G.

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT went further this week -- though not far enough -- in reining in juries in civil cases that award outlandish punitive damages. By a disappointingly narrow 5-4 vote, the justices overturned a jury's decision that Philip Morris should pay $79.5 million to the widow of a smoker who died of lung cancer. The value of her actual damages was only $821,000. The justices could -- and should -- have ruled clearly that the $79.

Citing an alleged misrepresentation by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, a judge ruled Wednesday that four people can seek punitive damages against the Los Angeles Archdiocese for failing to protect them from a priest they accused of sexual abuse. The ruling, the first of its kind in the Los Angeles clergy sexual abuse scandal, could increase pressure on the archdiocese to reach a settlement with its accusers.

In the latest of a series of costly verdicts in discrimination cases against the Los Angeles Fire Department, a jury this week awarded $6.2 million to a female firefighter who said she was harassed because she is black and a lesbian. Brenda Lee is due back in court today for the jury to consider punitive damages against her former supervisors. That could result in the city paying her even more money, officials said. "This verdict is awful....