Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

High court judging tobacco verdict

Justices examine a jury's damage award of $79.5-million against cigarette maker Philip Morris in a smoker's death by lung cancer .

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published November 1, 2006

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court grappled Tuesday with whether to allow a $79.5-million verdict against a cigarette company, a case that business groups are pointing to in asking the justices to clamp down on large damage awards.

Mayola Williams was in the crowded courtroom to hear the justices discuss the judgment that an Oregon jury imposed against Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA in connection with the death of her husband, Jesse.

A two-pack-a-day smoker of Marlboros for 45 years, Jesse Williams died of lung cancer nine years ago. Mayola Williams followed through on a promise she said she made to her husband and sued Philip Morris, which makes Marlboros, for fraud. She won.

Her lawyer, Robert Peck, told the justices they could uphold her $79.5-million punitive damage award without overturning prior rulings that limited punitive damages. Such damages are money intended to punish a defendant for its behavior and to deter repetition. The earlier cases did not involve personal injury.

The jury award was appropriate because it is punishing Philip Morris' misconduct for a decades-long "massive market-directed fraud" that misled people into thinking cigarettes were not dangerous or addictive, Peck said.

Williams, according to his widow, never gave any credence to surgeon general health warnings about smoking cigarettes because tobacco companies insisted they were safe. Only after falling sick did Williams tell his wife: "Those darn cigarette people finally did it. They were lying all the time."

Philip Morris' lawyer, Andrew Frey, said a jury can punish the company only for the harm done to Williams, not to other smokers. The jury should have been told explicitly that other smokers, no matter how tragic their stories, would have to prove their own cases, Frey said.

"Confine the jury to its proper domain, and its domain is the case before it," he said.

The case is being watched closely as a test of whether the new makeup of the Supreme Court will lead to changes in its prior rulings limiting punitive damages.

The two newest members of the court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, gave no indication that they would support relaxing limits set out in two rulings during the past 10 years. Roberts and Alito, conservative appointees of President Bush, were not on the court when those cases were decided in 1996 and 2003.

Conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have been strong opponents of any constitutional limits on jury awards.

Roberts at one point asked Peck whether he was asking the court to overrule the earlier decisions. Peck said he was not.

Oregon courts have upheld the verdict, even after the Supreme Court sent the case back earlier to make sure it conformed to the 2003 ruling.

Several justices said the best course may be to ask the state Supreme Court once again to explain its ruling.

"Isn't perhaps the better course to send this back and say we don't know what you mean?" Justice David Souter said.

[Last modified November 1, 2006, 01:10:20]