In a 5-3 ruling last June—Justice Samuel Alito had recused himself because he owned Exxon Mobil stock—the Supreme Court capped the punitive award at $507.5 million, based on the actual damages plus other settlements.

The court determined that in the realm of the reckless, Exxon's conduct had not been particularly egregious and should therefore be penalized according to a "typical" jury's determination of a one-to-one ratio to actual damages.

This left the once-presumed "spillionaires" to receive an average of $30,000 each, before interest. Many viewed this as an insult added to the injury of being denied a livelihood. The situation was worse for highly leveraged fishermen who had borrowed for specialized boats and equipment idled by the spill.

While critics have a point that the Supreme Court more or less made up the one-to-one principle, they're forgetting that the point of punitive damages is to punish offenders and deter new offenses, not to make plaintiffs whole.

It's also true that some plaintiffs are more equal than others. No fewer than 52 categories of plaintiffs will receive varying amounts under a formula gauging harm based on a victim's level of economic activity before the spill.

The half-billion-dollar question remains. Exxon says it shouldn't have to pay any interest at all; at most, it says, interest should accrue only after the Supreme Court ruled in the case, not from the date of the original judgment in 1994.

Nonsense, answers Jeffrey Fischer, a Stanford Law School professor who helped to represent the plaintiffs. In briefs to the appellate court in December, he argued that in prior cases before the Ninth Circuit, interest has always been calculated from the original date of judgment.

Does that make it a lock? No. "After the Ninth Circuit decides the issue, the loser will have the right to seek Supreme Court review," Fischer said, somewhat ruefully.

That is not encouraging for the plaintiffs, particularly given the drop in punitive damages.

So, as we cross our fingers for some expediency in one of the longest and most expensive and largest punitive award fights in history, here are two final numbers to consider: 4 billion and 26,000.

The 4 billion figure totals up how much Exxon made on the $500 million that it didn't pay in 1994, based on the oil company's return-on-investment during the past two decades.

Translation: The company's appeals let it earn enough to pay the verdict eight times over. (Even if you include the company's legal fees—which one plaintiffs lawyer estimated at $400 million, based on filings his associates had seen—Exxon has earned more than four times what it didn't pay in 1994.)

The latter figure—26,000—represents the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's estimate of the number of gallons of Exxon Valdez crude that remain in the Alaskan sand and soil.