ATLANTIC CITY, April 11 (Reuters) — Jurors deciding whether to award punitive damages to a New Jersey man who blamed Merck's Vioxx painkiller for his heart attack adjourned without reaching a verdict on Monday after six hours of deliberation.
Robert Gordon, left, represented John McDarby, and Mark Lanier represented Thomas Cona in the Vioxx suit against Merck in New Jersey.
To award punitive damages, the jurors in New Jersey Superior Court need to find that Merck withheld material information from the Food and Drug Administration and that its actions were deliberately meant to harm.
They will resume deliberating on Tuesday; the product liability trial lasted more than a month. The jurors adjourned after 8 p.m., raising expectations that they were close to a decision.
Last Wednesday, jurors awarded $4.5 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiff, a 77-year-old New Jersey man, John McDarby, finding that Vioxx was a significant contributing factor in his heart attack.
Under state law, any punitive damages would be capped at $22.5 million — five times compensatory damages. Earlier in the day, a lawyer for Mr. McDarby told the jury that the company needed to be punished for its behavior.
"You've got to punish them," the lawyer, Mark Lanier, said in closing arguments. "You've got a chance to say this is how business is going to be done from now on out."
A lawyer for Merck argued the company did nothing wrong.
"This is not a company that was hiding data or ignoring red flags as they came in," the lawyer, Christy Jones, said.
As part of its deliberation, the jury considered whether Merck intentionally withheld from regulators an analysis of several clinical trials performed by a company statistician in 2000 that showed a higher incidence of heart attacks among patients taking Vioxx compared with other drugs.
The analysis was submitted to the F.D.A. in 2001. Merck maintains it submitted the heart attack data, but not the analysis because it was statistically invalid.
The same jury last week determined that the drug was not a significant cause of a heart attack suffered by a second plaintiff, Thomas Cona.
Merck, which faces nearly 10,000 Vioxx product liability cases, withdrew the $2.5-billion-a-year drug off the market in September 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes among those who used it for at least 18 months.
