Court refuses to free ExxonMobil from paying $5 billion damages

Petroleum News Alaska Staff

The Supreme Court refused Oct. 2 to free Exxon Mobil Corp. from having to pay $5 billion in damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the nation’s worst ever.

The oil company still has a variety of other appeals pending, and the high court ruling does not obligate the company to pay anything right away, said company spokesman Tom Cirigliano.

In this appeal, lawyers for Exxon Mobil had urged the justices to throw out the punitive-damages award on grounds of irregularities during jury deliberations.

“We’re not even close,” to the end of the case, Cirigliano said. “This doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on us having to pay the $5 billion.”

In one of several challenges to the $5 billion award imposed by a federal jury in 1994, ExxonMobil attacked the behavior of Don Warrick, a court bailiff who escorted the jury and served food to its members during five months of trial and deliberations in Anchorage.

Warrick admitted that in a conversation with one of the Exxon Valdez trial jurors he pulled out his gun and removed one of its bullets before saying another juror — one holding out against making a punitive-damages award — should be put “out of her misery.”

Warrick, who said he was only joking, was fired. He died in 1996.

But U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland refused to order a new punitive-damages trial, ruling that the holdout juror had not known during the deliberations about Warrick’s comment. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his ruling last March.

In the appeal acted on Oct. 2, Exxon Mobil’s lawyers argued that such a presumption should exist.