Democracy for Vancouver

If you’re fucked by Big Oil, you wait 20 years for compensation.

If you are Big Oil, you spend $800 million to save $2 billion, when over those twenty years you’ve made half a trillion dollars in profit:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday slashed the $2.5 billion punitive damages award in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to $500 million.

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Justice David Souter wrote for the court that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses, about $500 million compensation.
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A jury decided Exxon should pay $5 billion in punitive damages. A federal appeals court cut that verdict in half in 1994.

The Supreme Court divided on its decision, 5-3, with Justice Samuel Alito taking no part in the case because he owns Exxon stock.

Exxon has fought vigorously to reduce or erase the punitive damages verdict by a jury in Alaska four years ago for the accident that dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. The environmental disaster led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals.
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In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens supported the $2.5 billion figure for punitive damages, saying Congress has chosen not to impose restrictions in such circumstances.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also dissented, saying the court was engaging in “lawmaking” by concluding that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses.

“The new law made by the court should have been left to Congress,” wrote Ginsburg. Justice Stephen Breyer made a similar point, opposing a rigid 1 to 1 ratio of punitive damages to victim compensation.

Those $800 million legal fees have got to be the worst return on investment Exxon’s gotten in the last two decades - only 150% profit! But of course, saving money wasn’t really the point, was it?

Nope. The point was to tell any current or future plaintiff against Exxon that we will fight you until your grandchildren are dead and buried.

I’m too disgusted to write more, but if you want further details on this travesty, I wrote about the arguments in the case before the Supremes here.