A federal
judge in North Carolina has reduced a $50 million punitive damages award in a
nuisance suit against a hog farm that stored the animal waste in open-air
lagoons and sprayed it on nearby fields. McKiver, et al. v. Murphy-Brown, LLC, 7:14-CV-180 (May 7, 2018, E.D.N.C.). The Court relied on North Carolina’s law
capping punitive damages awards to reduce the $50 million reward to $3.25
million.
The case
was brought by ten plaintiffs whose property is located near a major industrial
hog farm operated by Murphy-Brown, LLC, Smithfield Foods’ hog-production
division. The plaintiffs alleged the 15,000-head
hog farm operation constituted a public nuisance because the anaerobic lagoons
– huge pits of hog feces – emitted noxious odors and attracted buzzards and
swarms of insects. Plaintiffs also alleged
the practice of spraying the broken-down animal waste on nearby fields creates
a stench that remains in their clothing and coats their homes and cars with
liquid waste.
The jury
awarded each plaintiff $75,000 in compensatory damages and $5 million in
punitive damages, which the Court reduced to $325,000 per plaintiff pursuant to
North Carolina’s cap on punitive damages. North Carolina’s legislature changed
the state’s nuisance law last year to make suits against the hog industry more
difficult to bring and capped punitive damages to three times compensatory
damages. The original bill contained a
provision to make the law retroactive, but that provision was ultimately
stricken.
