Montana Complainant Kransky Claims $184.3M in Compensatory, Punitive Damages
Former Montanao state prison guard Loren Kransky seek a total of $184.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages after jurors in Los Angeles heard closing arguments over artificial hip implant manufacturer DePuy Orthopaedics liable for allegedly marketing a defective product and failing to inform the complainant about the negative impact associated with it, court records show.
Kransky’s case is the first out of 10,750 lawsuits to go on trial this year over the recalled implant of DePuy, about which his lawyer Brian Panish stated that Johnson & Johnson sacrificed the quality of their metal-on-metal hips over pursuit of profit. Moreover, DePuy failed to inform doctors about the risk if its hip prosthesis becomes defective. Because of this, Panish demanded for his client compensatory damages amounting to $5.3 million and punitive damages reaching $179 million.
DePuy Orthopeadics, a business unit of Johnson & Johnson, recalled its ASR hip systems in 2010 after an unpublished report from the National Joint Registry of Wales came out regarding the alarming growth in number of its failing hip implants in the United Kingdom (UK), medical experts say. Unfortunately, the United States at that time has no monitoring group to track any medical devices which have had high failing rates.
However, after the product recall in 2010, several patients in the United States realized that they are not alone in this misfortune of suffering from a defective implant and started seeking for legal help in obtaining compensatory damages.
Last year, DePuy has exerted necessary efforts of settling the lawsuits filed with a settlement offer of $200,000 per case, against which some of the plaintiffs have had declined and for which most of them went on claiming for higher compensation, as has been the case of Kransky, 65, a former prison guard in the State of Montana.
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Jurors Hear Closing Arguments in California DePuy ASR Trial