A divided appellate panel found most of Exxon’s challenges waived and rejected its argument that the Due Process Clause caps a compensatory award in a former gas station worker’s leukemia case.
A divided Pennsylvania Superior Court panel on Oct. 15 upheld a $725 million jury verdict against Exxon Mobil Corp. in a leukemia case brought by a former gas station worker, ruling that the company failed to preserve most of its appellate arguments and that the federal Due Process Clause does not limit compensatory damages the way it limits punitive awards.
The non-precedential memorandum, written by Judge Kunselman and joined by Judge Nichols, affirmed the Philadelphia County judgment in Gill v. Exxon Mobil Corp., No. 2811 EDA 2024. Judge Sullivan filed a separate statement concurring in part and dissenting in part, saying the court should have reviewed Exxon’s challenge to the size of the award on its merits.
According to the opinion, Paul Gill began working at Cole’s Garage, a service station in Potter County, in 1974. For about five years he pumped gas, repaired cars and used Mobil Oil gasoline to clean car parts without gloves or a respirator. Mobil Oil, which merged with Exxon in 1999, never warned him that the benzene in its gasoline was a carcinogen, the court wrote.
Gill was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2019. The court recounted years of chemotherapy, a stem-cell transplant and complications that left him insulin-dependent, followed by colorectal cancer that the opinion attributes to his immune-suppression medications. Gill and his wife, Diane, sued Exxon and more than a dozen other companies in May 2020. Most of the other defendants settled, and none is part of the appeal.
On May 9, 2024, a jury found Exxon liable for negligence and product-defect strict liability. It awarded Paul Gill $725 million in non-economic damages and Diane Gill $500,000 for loss of consortium. According to the dissent’s summary of the trial record, the award included $435 million for pain and suffering, $253.75 million for loss of enjoyment of life, and about $18.1 million each for embarrassment and humiliation and for disfigurement. The trial court later added delay damages, bringing the total to more than $815.8 million.
Causation arguments waived
On appeal, Exxon argued the plaintiffs never proved Mobil gasoline contained at least 2% benzene, the figure underlying the exposure calculations of the Gills’ expert, Dr. Robert Laumbach. The panel held that argument waived because Exxon had argued something different at trial: that the experts addressed benzene rather than gasoline itself. The court also found Exxon never raised a separate proximate-cause argument below.
The panel similarly found most of Exxon’s attacks on Laumbach and a second expert, Dr. Rory Shallis, waived. The one preserved argument, that the experts misapplied the Bradford Hill causation factors, consisted of a single sentence that did not show an abuse of discretion, the court said.
Damages and due process
Exxon argued the award far exceeded reasonable compensation. The majority said Exxon never argued that the trial judge abused her discretion in refusing a new trial or remittitur and instead asked the appellate court to reweigh the evidence. Under Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent, the panel wrote, it could not decide whether the award was “correct or excessive” but only whether the trial court acted within its discretion.
The court also rejected what it called Exxon’s novel argument that the compensatory award was a punitive award in disguise. Exxon had proposed the Gills’ $500,000 pretrial settlement with former defendant Root Oil as a benchmark, producing what it called a 1,450-to-1 ratio. The panel held that the U.S. Supreme Court’s guideposts for reviewing punitive damages, from BMW of North America v. Gore, cannot sensibly be applied to compensatory damages, noting that the jury was never instructed on punitive damages. It called the settlement figure “not an apples-to-apples comparison.”
Juror posts
Exxon also sought a new trial based on online posts it says were written by Juror No. 2 on a message board devoted mainly to perfume. In the posts, quoted in the opinion, the author described Exxon as “objectively a villain” and referred to a settlement offer the plaintiffs purportedly made before deliberations. Exxon contended the posts revealed bias concealed during jury selection and exposure to outside information.
Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Carmella Jacquinto dismissed Exxon’s motion to add the issue as untimely, because it was filed Aug. 21, 2024, more than three months after the verdict. The Superior Court found no abuse of discretion and held the issue waived. Neither court ruled on whether the posts were authentic.
The dissent
In the separate statement, Sullivan wrote that Exxon had made a “colorable argument” that the trial court abused its discretion, even though its brief did not use that phrase. She singled out the disfigurement award of more than $18 million, noting that the only trial testimony Exxon identified described surgical scars and that “there is no indication the jury saw Gill’s scar.” The trial court never addressed that specific claim, Sullivan wrote, and would have reviewed the damages ruling on its merits.
The memorandum is designated non-precedential under the Superior Court’s operating procedures.
Read the full opinions: Gill v. Exxon Mobil Corp., No. 2811 EDA 2024 — Pa. Super. Ct. Memorandum (Oct. 15, 2026) and Gill v. Exxon Mobil Corp., No. 2811 EDA 2024 — Concurring/Dissenting Statement by Judge Sullivan (Oct. 15, 2026).
By The Trial Attorneys Editorial Staff
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