Florida jury awards widow billions after her husband dies of lung cancer from smoking. (Photo by azrasta/Creative Commons)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
This week a Florida jury imposed punitive damages of $23.6 billion on the country’s second largest cigarette company, R.J. Reynolds.
The lawsuit was filed by Cynthia Robinson of Pensacola. Her husband, Michael Johnson, died of lung cancer in 1996 at the age of 36 after years of up to three packs a day since the age of 13.
According to the Associated Press,
The case is one of thousands filed in Florida after the state Supreme Court in 2006 tossed out a $145 billion class action verdict. That ruling also said smokers and their families need only prove addiction and that smoking caused their illnesses or deaths.
Last year, Florida’s highest court re-approved that decision, which made it easier for sick smokers or their survivors to pursue lawsuits against tobacco companies without having to prove to the court again that Big Tobacco knowingly sold dangerous products and hid the hazards of cigarette smoking.
The damages a Pensacola jury awarded Friday to Cynthia Robinson after a four-week trial come in addition to $16.8 million in compensatory damages.
Robinson individually sued Reynolds, the country’s No. 2 cigarette maker, in 2008 on behalf of her late husband, Michael Johnson Sr. Her attorneys said the punitive damages are the largest of any individual case stemming from the original class action lawsuit.
“The jury wanted to send a statement that tobacco cannot continue to lie to the American people and the American government about the addictiveness of and the deadly chemicals in their cigarettes,” said one of the woman’s attorneys, Christopher Chestnut.
Defendants of the company said the damages awarded are excessive. Experts said the decision will likely to be rejected on appeal or the award will be reduced to substantially less than $23 billion.
Reuters reported the award “likely falls outside the boundaries for punitive damages that the U.S. Supreme Court has laid down in a series of cases.”
Nobody thinks the $23 billion is going to remain,” said Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University and the chair of its Tobacco Products Liability Project.
Because of constitutional guarantees of due process, the Supreme Court has shown a reluctance to allow punitive damages that are far out of line with compensatory damages in the same case, he said. The court’s general guideline is that the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages should be below 10:1.
The court precedent, though, still leaves room for a punitive award of more than $150 million, Daynard said.
Punitive damages are meant to discourage companies or people from bad conduct, while compensatory damages are intended to pay victims for their actual losses.
“There were all these concerns about runaway awards with regard to punitive damages,” said Neil Vidmar, professor of law at Duke University. “Some are saying that nine times (the compensatory damages) is the absolute limit, but actually many times, the courts have cut that down to one or two times.”
Robinson’s 2008 lawsuit follows a class-action legal challenge she was part of in 1994. She claimed the tobacco company “conspired to conceal the health dangers and addictive nature of its products,” according to Reuters.
In the 1994 class action lawsuit, a jury awarded $145 billion in punitive damages against the company, which was the largest in U.S. history at the time.
But, the Florida Supreme Court rejected that decision in 2006. Instead, plaintiffs were told they could file lawsuits separately, since each of their cases were so different. Robinson was one of the plaintiffs that proceeded to file an individual lawsuit.
Reynolds’ attorneys said the company will appeal the decision. Similar lawsuits with punitive damages in the tens of millions of dollars have been upheld in courts across the country.