Tobacco Litigation Alive And Well In Florida

A jury in Florida state court, while denying a request for punitive damages, awarded $6.4 million in compensatory damages to the surviving relatives of a man who died of emphysema in 2010, after smoking for decades. The plaintiffs claimed that tobacco companies concealed the dangers of cigarettes, causing the man’s nicotine addiction and the smoking-related disease. Plaintiff lawyer Keith Mitnik “walked jurors through decades of tobacco industry documents plotting the most effective ways to cast doubt on the growing weight of scientific evidence … concerning smoking’s dangers,” says a trial recap on the Courtroom Connect website. Defense attorney John M. Walker, partner at Jones Day, told the jury that the deceased smoker before he died had acknowledged in deposition that he ignored the warning that has been on cigarette packs since the 1960s. The jury split the difference on fault 60-40, with 60 percent apportioned to the smoker, and it declined the plaintiffs’ request for more than $19 million in punitives. This case is one of thousand of cases in Florida that are fallout from a 2006 Florida Supreme Court decision invalidating a tobacco class action, but allowing individual cases to go forward. The day before the verdict was announced, opening arguments were heard in another Florida case, this one targeting both Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. The plaintiff is the widow of a two-pack-a-day smoker who is said to have started at age 15 and continued even after he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.