Jury Awards $43M in Asbestos Trial

A California jury awarded $43 million to a woman with mesothelioma, one of the largest asbestos verdicts since courts across the nation reopened last year.

Friday’s verdict, all compensatory damages, followed two weeks of in-person trial. The jury found Algoma Hardwoods Inc. liable for Deanne Warren’s mesothelioma, which she got in 2019 after being exposed to asbestos. The lawsuit had facts similar to those in a South Carolina case, where a jury awarded $32 million last year to a woman who got mesothelioma from doing laundry, exposing herself to asbestos dust that was on the clothes her husband wore while at work.

The trial, which took place in the Long Beach courthouse of Los Angeles County Superior Court, involved Warren, 64, and her husband, Craig Warren, 66, who worked in residential and commercial carpentry in the late 1970s and became a general contractor in the 1980s.