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Philip Morris USA Inc. and Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. paid a total of $4.5 million to a Florida man with emphysema in November -- Philip Morris' first-ever payment to an injured individual smoker. The plaintiff's lawyer made no statement about the event until the time for a last-resort appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court passed in January.
A jury in St. Petersburg, Fla., found in 2003 that the two tobacco companies should pay $3.26 million to John Eastman because they were partially liable for causing his addiction to cigarettes, which led to his health problems. . . .
Lisa Gonzalez, a spokesperson for Philip Morris' parent company Altria Group Inc., said the defendant paid Eastman $3,334,955. She said this reflected the $2.6 million judgment entered against Philip Morris and "$415,000 for attorneys' fees and $20,00 for costs, plus interest at the statutory rate."
Gonzalez said it is the first time Philip Morris paid damages to a smoker in a product liability case.
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John Eastman doesn't feel victorious. He doesn't feel like a man who took on Big Tobacco in a Pinellas County courtroom and won. He's too sick for that.
He can't stop the shaking in his hands. He's always out of breath and tires easily from chronic emphysema. The oxygen tank attached to his electric wheelchair keeps him alive.
Eastman, 76, a lifelong smoker who sued two tobacco companies and won a verdict in 2003, lived to collect more than $3.2-million after attorney's fees.
When someone visited him last week to collect a debt, his hands shook too badly to write a check.
"I'm sick, and I'm never going to get better," Eastman says. "What they paid, it's a drop in the bucket. I don't enjoy looking like this. They should have paid millions and millions so people could see their evil. They weren't punished enough for it."
Two years after a jury awarded him $3.26-million, saying Philip Morris USA and the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. were partially responsible for addicting him to the cigarettes that ruined his health, Eastman has finally collected much of his money.
With appeals exhausted, the tobacco companies paid $4.5-million (they also were assessed Eastman's attorney's fees) in November, the largest single judgment ever paid by Big Tobacco in an individual smoker's case through decades of litigation and hundreds of cases. . . .
And it's the first time that Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette maker, has ever been forced to pay a judgment in an individual case.
Philip Morris USA on Monday said a Florida appellate court affirmed a jury's 2003 decision that ordered it and Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. to pay damages to a former smoker with lung disease.
Last year a jury awarded about $6.54 million to John Eastman but found Eastman, a former smoker with a respiratory illness, to be 50 percent at fault. It found Philip Morris USA, the largest U.S. cigarette maker, liable for 40 percent of total damages, or about $2.6 million, and found Brown & Williamson liable for 10 percent of the damages, or close to $654,000. The jury did not award punitive damages.
A Florida appellate court has affirmed, without explanation, a St. Petersburg jury's 2003 decision ordering Philip Morris USA and Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. to pay damages to a former smoker who has lung disease.
A three-judge panel of Florida's Second Circuit Court of Appeal rejected the company's argument that the jury was given improper legal instructions when it concluded that John Eastman, a 75-year-old former smoker who suffers from a respiratory illness, was entitled to damages.
"Philip Morris USA, like all parties in any lawsuit, is entitled to have the jury hear the appropriate evidence and apply the correct law in reaching a verdict. In this case, the company believes that did not occur," said William S. Ohlemeyer, . . .
"The company will now seek further appellate review," he added.
The judgment holds Philip Morris USA liable for approximately $2.6 million in compensatory damages, plus interest. The jury found that the plaintiff was not entitled to any punitive damages.
TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 2004
Panel assigned, subject to change: Judges Fulmer, Casanueva and Salcines
9:30 A. M. SESSION
2D03-02357 Philip Morris USA Inc.
v.
John Eastman
The significance of this reversal cannot be underestimated. It brings to an end one of the most important episodes of American law--the use of multi-billion dollar lawsuits to change a politically powerful industry.
It also shows that, while the law can be changed to achieve many laudatory social goals, it can change only so much before it snaps back into its old shape. The Florida court had the unenviable task of restoring the law's rightful contours. The reasons it did so are important to understand . . .
What changed over the course of the Engle litigation? Most importantly, it is now well understood that Engle is no longer needed - a truth that may have encouraged the Florida appeals court to write the sweeping decision that it rendered.
In 1994, when Engle was filed, the tobacco industry seemed to occupy a position of political invulnerability. Now, of course, it is a political pariah.
The industry operates under a severely constrained environment. . . .
Like grand theater, Engle was a melodrama--overdrawn, excessive, and ultimately as much about emotion as about law. It served its purpose, and now it is being retired.
The saga of the case is an example of how lawsuits can sometimes have their greatest effect outside the courtroom, not within. For those who think America is a better place now because Big Tobacco has been domesticated, the legal rights and wrongs of Judge Kaye's trial plan may seem like a secondary concern - and, indeed, even this landmark reversal of a landmark verdict may seem a secondary event.
Remember, it's a legal product. Hence, in weather terms, for the government it's "The Perfect Scam."
The feds allow the tobacco growers to go about their business -- in some cases with subsidies -- and the tobacco product manufacturers can do the same. The product gets taxed at every level to the point where running black market cigarette operations rival selling drugs. But the tobacco product makers, by law, cannot advertise their "legal" product on radio or TV.
The government spends oodles of money on studies to support its contention that smoking kills people. Since the release of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health in the United States in 1964, about 10 million people have died from smoking-related diseases . . .
And based on those studies, the feds force the manufacturers to ostensibly label tobacco products with skull and crossbones, while craftily using the research to make court cases against them.
From the cases, the government reaps millions. And in the case of one state, the tobacco settlement money gets used to subsidize a tobacco plant.
Meanwhile, elected officials scratch their heads, baffled by the ill state of health of their constituents, and escalating health and insurance costs. . .
And when will any of this bizarre chain of taxing, suing and smoking end?
Don't hold your breath.
John Eastman started smoking when he was 12. It was the 1940s, and smoking was as American as baseball. Cigarette ads dominated the radio, and the boy who wanted a career on the airwaves couldn't miss them.
As an adult, Eastman smoked four packs a day. He failed at every effort to quit.
"I was addicted," said Eastman, 74, a former radio personality once known as Tampa Bay's dean of talk radio. "The cigarette companies were handing me a deadly instrument and they weren't telling me."
On Thursday, a Pinellas County jury agreed. After a four-week trial and two days of deliberations, the jurors handed Eastman $3.26-million in damages for the cigarettes he says caused his emphysema and an aortic aneurysm.
The verdict against Philip Morris USA and the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., which made the cigarettes Eastman smoked until he quit in 1995, is the largest-ever tobacco award in the Tampa Bay area.
"I'm very grateful for the jury's decision," Eastman said afterward, sitting in an electric scooter that carries him and his oxygen around. "If there's anything just in society, I'll live to see them pay."
Both companies say they plan to appeal the verdict.
Philip Morris USA will appeal a state court jury’s decision today to award $6.538 million in compensatory damages to a 74-year-old former smoker because it is inconsistent with the law and the facts of the case.
The Pinellas County Circuit Court jury refused to award punitive damages and found plaintiff John F. Eastman 50 percent at fault, which will reduce the judgment by half.
“The evidence showed that Mr. Eastman knew for more than four decades that smoking could cause health problems,” said William S. Ohlemeyer, Philip Morris USA vice president and associate general counsel.
John Eastman has won his lawsuit against the two cigarette manufacturers he blames for the four-pack-a-day smoking habit. He says it left him emphysema and cardiovascular problems.
A Circuit Court jury ruled Thursday that Philip Morris USA and Brown and Williamson Tobacco are a combined 50 percent responsible for Eastman's 54-year smoking habit. It says Eastman himself is responsible for the other half.
The result has been a high-stakes game of chicken in which plaintiffs and anti-smoking groups have urged authorities to call the company's bluff. State attorneys general simultaneously are vowing to sue the company and to ask trial Judge Nicholas G. Byron to lower the appeal bond.
Tobacco company debt ratings have been lowered and bond sales canceled since the March 21 verdict, as the financial repercussions have overshadowed legal issues in the Illinois class-action case, which was the first to accuse cigarette makers of deceptively marketing low-tar cigarettes.
In further fallout Thursday, California officials temporarily shelved plans to sell $2.3 billion in bonds backed by future tobacco settlement receipts. Missouri also scrapped a bond sale. . .
In more bad news for Philip Morris and No. 3 cigarette maker Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., a state court jury in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Thursday found them liable in a case filed by John F. Eastman, 74, a longtime smoker who suffers from emphysema. It appeared the $6.54-million verdict would be halved based on a finding that Eastman was 50% at fault. The firms said they would appeal. . .
Some analysts say that although Philip Morris may be unable to pay the bond and the states, Altria certainly could.
"It may be literally true that Philip Morris alone" can't pay the $12 billion, said Charles Linke, an emeritus professor of finance at the University of Illinois who is a consultant to plaintiffs lawyers in the light-cigarette case. But "Altria certainly can post the bond of $12 billion," Linke said.
A Pinellas County Circuit Court jury has found Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation 10 percent liable for injuries a Florida smoker allegedly suffered.
The six-member jury awarded a total of $6,537,000 in compensatory damages to John Eastman, but decided against awarding any punitive damages. As part of its decision, the jury found Philip Morris, the other tobacco company defendant in the case, liable for 40 percent of total damages.
The jury also found Mr. Eastman 50 percent at fault for his injuries. . .
"Unfortunately, we believe key evidence was improperly excluded by the trial court and we are confident that this decision will be reversed on appeal," he said.
Philip Morris USA will appeal a state court jury's decision today to award $6.538 million in compensatory damages to a 74-year-old former smoker because it is inconsistent with the law and the facts of the case.
"The evidence showed that Mr. Eastman knew for more than four decades that smoking could cause health problems," said William S. Ohlemeyer, Philip Morris USA vice president and associate general counsel.
"Mr. Eastman is an intelligent and well-educated man who testified he knew as early as the 1950s that smoking was linked to cancer and other diseases; that he began 'to seriously worry' about the health risks of smoking when the 1966 Surgeon General's warning was printed on cigarette packs; and that he was convinced by the 1970s that smoking was dangerous.
"The real issue in a case like this is whether people who smoke are aware of the risks, whether they have been warned about those risks and whether the law holds them legally responsible for the informed decisions they make. We believe the evidence on each of these issues favored Philip Morris USA," Ohlemeyer added.
Ohlemeyer said the company will now ask Judge Anthony Rondolino to set aside the verdict, and will appeal if the Court rejects that request.
Two cigarette companies said on Thursday they would appeal a Florida jury's decision to award about $6.54 million to a 74-year-old former smoker, arguing that the plaintiff knew the risks of smoking.
A Pinellas County Circuit Court jury found John Eastman was 50 percent at fault, which cut the compensatory damages judgment by half, Philip Morris USA and Brown & Williamson said.
The jury found Philip Morris USA liable for 40 percent of total damages, or about $2.61 million, and found Brown & Williamson liable for 10 percent of the damages, or just under $654,000. The jury did not award punitive damages, the companies said. . .
Ohlemeyer said his company plans to ask Judge Anthony Rondolino to set aside the verdict, and would appeal if the court rejects that request.