Pennsylvania’s Superior Court affirmed a judgment for mechanic Paul Gill and his wife after finding that Exxon had failed to preserve most of its causation and sufficiency challenges. The jury’s $725 million award to Gill compensated pain, suffering and other personal harm, with no punitive damages.
The $815,833,561.65 judgment against ExxonMobil, won by Pennsylvania mechanic Paul Gill and his wife, survived largely because the company had not preserved key causation and sufficiency objections, the appeals court held. The jury awarded Gill $725 million for pain, suffering and other personal harm, not punitive damages; the court described leukemia that left him isolated from family. In an October 15 memorandum reported by Claims Journal on October 27, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the judgment. The total also includes $500,000 awarded to Gill’s wife, Diane, and delay damages added by the Philadelphia trial court.
Exxon disputed that the Gills had proved its gasoline caused the leukemia. Its trial position, recounted in the opinion, was that their experts had addressed benzene rather than the gasoline product at issue. After the 2024 verdict, Exxon called it “irrational,” according to a May 2024 Claims Journal report.
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Gill began work at Cole’s Garage in Potter County, Pennsylvania, in 1974. He pumped gas and cleaned car parts with Mobil gasoline. The Superior Court’s account of the trial says he wore no gloves or respirator and recounts evidence that the American Petroleum Institute had told members, including Mobil, in 1948 that there was “no safe level of benzene exposure.”
Gill was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2019. The opinion describes chemotherapy, a stem-cell transplant, severe complications and his withdrawal from family and friends because of infection risk. The jury found that Mobil, Exxon’s predecessor, negligently manufactured and sold defective gasoline containing benzene. It awarded Gill $725 million across pain and suffering, embarrassment and humiliation, loss of enjoyment of life, and disfigurement. Diane Gill received $500,000 for loss of consortium.
The trial judge removed the Gills’ request for punitive damages before the case went to the jury. The $725 million was compensation for personal harm, even though Exxon later argued that its size made it punitive in effect. The majority rejected that argument as meritless. After the verdict, the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas denied Exxon’s post-trial requests and added delay damages, as Claims Journal reported at the time. The resulting judgment was $815,833,561.65, the figure in the Superior Court opinion.
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The appellate majority traced a difference between what Exxon argued to the trial judge and what it argued on appeal. At trial, Exxon challenged whether the experts had shown that gasoline, as distinct from benzene, could cause Gill’s leukemia. On appeal, it argued that the Gills had failed to establish enough benzene in Mobil gasoline to support a particular expert opinion. The majority held that Exxon had not made that concentration argument below and could not introduce it for the first time on appeal.
The court also held that Exxon had failed to preserve a separate argument about whether its product was a legal cause of Gill’s injury. Most of its challenges to the admission of the Gills’ medical experts met the same barrier. On the one expert argument the majority considered preserved, it found Exxon’s appellate presentation insufficient to show that the trial court had abused its discretion.
That left the damages challenge. Exxon called the award excessive and sought a new trial or a reduction. The majority said it could review whether the trial judge had abused her discretion in leaving the verdict intact, but could not decide afresh what amount it would have awarded. In the majority’s words, the court “may not ask itself whether the jury’s award of $725,000,000 in compensation to Mr. Gill was correct or excessive.” It found that Exxon’s appellate argument had not shown an abuse of discretion.
Judge Sullivan dissented in part. The partial dissent agreed that some of Exxon’s argument sought to have the appeals court reweigh the evidence, but said the company had made a “colorable argument” that denying relief on damages was an abuse of discretion. Judge Sullivan pointed in particular to Exxon’s challenge to the disfigurement award, which the dissent identifies as $18.125 million, and would have reached a substantive review of the trial court’s decision. Judges Kunselman and Nichols formed the majority.
Exxon also sought to reopen the case over online posts it attributed to a juror. The trial court dismissed its attempt to add that issue to its post-trial motion as untimely, and the Superior Court held the issue waived on appeal. That was another requested route to a new trial that the panel did not reach on the merits.
The Superior Court judgment leaves the full $815,833,561.65 in place. **P&L translation:** for a reader tracking injury exposure in Pennsylvania verdicts, the distinction is stark: $725 million of the jury’s award to Gill was compensatory, and the majority’s decision turned substantially on which objections Exxon had put before the trial court. In its statement on the verdict, reported by Claims Journal in May 2024, Exxon said it planned to “exhaust all available appeals.”
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