This case has been a rollercoaster ride for all concerned. That Reno, Nevada, jury - which first awarded $134 million to three women who claim the drugmaker’s hormone replacement med caused their breast cancers - late last week reduced the amount by $100 million after realizing they weren’t supposed to award compensatory and punitive damages all at once. And so, Wyeth was told to pay $35 million for compensatory damages.

Now, though, the jury decided to award $99 million in punitive damages to punish the drugmaker for allegedly hiding safety info about Prempro. Wyeth plans to appeal. “This verdict is an extreme aberration,” Heidi Hubbard, a partner in the law firm representing Wyeth, tells the Associated Press. “It is inconsistent with every other hormone treatment case to be tried to date and it is inconsistent with the evidence.”

After lawyers for both sides gave closing arguments again today, the state court judge instructed the five-man, two-women jury to move to the punitive stage to consider whether Wyeth’s actions were so “reprehensible” that additional damages were warranted to punish it and discourage such behavior in the future. And so in Nevada, reprehensible will cost $134 million.

The judgment remains the largest award to date against Wyeth, which faces about 5,300 similar lawsuits in state and federal courts. All involve the drugs Premarin, an estrogen replacement, and Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin. Wyeth has won two federal lawsuits and another in state court in Philadelphia since litigation over the drug began in August 2006. Three Philadelphia juries also have found the drugs caused breast cancer in women and ordered Wyeth to pay a total of $3 million in damages. Judges later threw out those verdicts because of flaws in the cases

The jurors returned this afternoon, two hours after they began deliberations following an impassioned plea by one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers to return a large enough judgment to “get the attention and hold responsible” a company with a net worth of $14.6 billion.