Jury awarded $1 billion to family

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Texas jury awarded $1 billion to the family of a woman who died after using one of the drugs in the fen-phen diet drug regimen.

4/28/04 - The company said Tuesday there is a strong basis to overturn the ruling in the District Court of Jefferson County, Texas, based on "legal errors made during the trial and in the charge to the jury."

Also, Texas has a cap on punitive damages in lawsuits, which could substantially shrink the award to the family of 41-year-old housewife Cynthia Cappel-Coffey, who used the drug Pondimin during a three-month period.

Tim Atkeson, an attorney representing Wyeth, said the jury granted $113 million in actual damages and $900 million in punitive damages. He expects the verdict to be overturned, or the award to be reduced to two-times actual damages, or about $5 million.

The jury verdict represents a setback to Wyeth, which has already taken $16.6 billion in charges for past and future payments to the to six-million Americans who took Fen-phen, a diet drug combination that paired Pondimin or another Wyeth drug called Redux with phentermine.

Those funds were for patients using fen-phen that developed heart valve problems.

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