Johnson & Johnson was successful in persuading an appeals court to overturn a jury judgement of more than $223 million that had been granted to a group of individuals who had previously used Baby Powder and who blamed their illnesses on asbestos in the talc-based version of the product.
According to the documents filed with the court on Tuesday, the appellate division of the Superior Court of New Jersey came to the conclusion that a lower court judge made a mistake when she allowed jurors to hear inappropriate scientific testimony linking the J&J product to the cancers of the four plaintiffs.
This verdict comes at a time when Johnson & Johnson is getting ready to face a slew of jury trials at the beginning of the next year about charges that company officials have known since the early 1970s that their talc contains trace levels of asbestos, but they have refused to inform either customers or regulators. J&J claims that its talc does not contain asbestos and that the business has been marketing it in an appropriate manner for more than a century.
