Judicial Watch: Big Hog Slammed Again
North Carolina juries are speaking clearly to Big Hog: Clean up your act, or keep facing huge awards to injured neighbors.
In the third and largest win for injured neighbors yet, a jury awarded over $473 million in damages against global megacorporation Smithfield Foods. Testimony and other evidence in the case followed the same pattern: The waste management practices dictated by Smithfield to its contract farmers were shown to result in inescapable stenches and airborne hog feces carried to the neighbors’ property. The jurors clearly agreed with the conclusion that awarding large punitive damages was necessary to break Smithfield of treating these damaging practices as merely business as usual.
More details of the evidence presented in this latest rebuke of Big Hog and the state legislators in its pocket can be read here.
