LITTLE ROCK — Donna Gail Scroggin’s punitive-damages trial against Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, now a division of Pfizer Inc., won’t be heard on July 20, U.S. District Judge Bill Wilson Jr. said Tuesday.
Instead, Wilson said, jurors will gather in his Little Rock courtroom to hear the trial of a Greenbrier woman’s 2004 lawsuit claiming that her breast cancer was caused by the ingestion of hormone replacement products.
A day after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a pharmaceutical company’s challenge to an appellate court’s decision in Scroggin’s hormone therapy case, her attorneys asked that Wilson place her case back on the docket for that day.
It had been set for that day until the appeal knocked it off the calendar.
Wilson denied the request Tuesday, saying he has already scheduled a trial in the 2004 case filed by Dianne LaFerrara of Greenbrier. He said Scroggin’s case will be rescheduled.
LaFerrara’s lawsuit said she began taking Wyeth Pharmaceuticals’ Premarin and Prempro drugs in 1994 and as a result, developed breast cancer in 1998.
Scroggin took hormone therapy medication for 11 years to alleviate menopausal symptoms and got cancer in both breasts, prompting a double mastectomy.
In 2008, a jury in Wilson’s courtroom found that the drugs caused Scroggin’s cancer and awarded her $2.7 million in compensatory damages, as well as about $27 million in punitive damages from both Wyeth and Upjohn, which is now also a subsidiary of Pfizer Inc.
Wilson later threw out both punitive awards, saying he shouldn’t have allowed certain testimony. The 8th Circuit upheld the compensatory damages award and Wilson’s dismissal of punitive damages owed by Upjohn, but reversed his dismissal of the punitive damages against Wyeth.
The St. Louis-based appeals court also ordered a retrial of the punitive-damages phase of Scroggin’s case.
The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear Wyeth’s appeal of the 8th Circuit’s ruling.
An article in Tuesday’s editions about the Supreme Court action in Scroggin’s case misidentified the plaintiff in the case that is now scheduled to be heard July 20.
Arkansas, Pages 8 on 06/23/2010