A federal judge ruled last month in favor of whistleblowers who reported to the government that Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen (now called J&J Innovative Medicine) illegally marketed antiretroviral HIV medication by misrepresenting the drugs’ effectiveness and side effects while offering it to inappropriate patient populations. Dallas firm Reese Marketos represented the whistleblowers on behalf of the federal government in what is likely the largest reward in case federal prosecutors declined.
The $1.64 billion reward is more than ten times what a jury ruled last year when it found that J&J should be fined $150 million for violating the False Claims Act (FCA) for defrauding federal payers by pushing sales reps to market the drug beyond what was approved by the FDA. In large whistleblower cases, the judge has to enter a final judgment because a jury can’t officially order a company to pay civil penalties or damages. In these cases, the defendant is liable for three times the damage done to the government in FCA cases, so the federal judge tripled the $120 million in damages the jury awarded to more than $360 million.
The opinion threw out $30 million in penalties for individual state violations. Next, the judge ruled that J&J would be fined $8,000 per false claim for civil penalties. With 159,574 false claims connected to the off-label use of the medications between 2006 and 2014, the total civil penalties came out to more than $1.2 billion. When...
National headlines from ABC NewsCatch up on the developing stories making headlines. DENVER -- A federal jury in Colorado on Monday found that one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy...