[Sock Puppet]

There is a pervasive "kill the lawyers" mentality here in the US that is rooted more in a need for scapegoats than actual fact. A sure-fire propaganda strategy is to paint the opposition as being in cahoots with the trial lawyers (as if trial lawyers were a monolithic entity that always works toward the same Evil Ends).

A handful of areas here are notorious for so-called runaway juries, most notably (IIRC) Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. I suspect that if those areas were eliminated, the average jury award would be even less significant than the numbers cited in the OP.