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Widow Wins $8 Million in Cigarette Death Case
By Tonya Alanez
Sun Sentinel
Posted February 19, 2009
A chain smoker who died of lung cancer is more to blame for his habit than tobacco companies, but Philip Morris must pay $8 million to the man's widow and son for concealing the dangers of cigarettes, a Broward County jury ordered Wednesday in a landmark case.
Its ruling in the lawsuit brought by Elaine Hess, of Cooper City, could foreshadow the outcome of 8,000 similar suits waiting to be tried across Florida. If so, anti-smoking advocates said they would be delighted to see Big Tobacco held accountable repeatedly for its negligence.
"This jury was able to look at the full picture, which includes really the reprehensible misconduct by the tobacco companies," said Edward L. Sweda Jr., senior attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University law school. "What they clearly did was reject Philip Morris' blame-the-smoker-for-smoking defense. Certainly, this is an encouraging event today and certainly a good sign for the cases to come."
The jury rejected Elaine Hess' demand for more than $130 million and found her husband, Stuart Hess, bore 58 percent of the blame for the damage he did to his health.
Stuart Hess, a chain smoker of up to three packs a day, died in 1997 at age 55.
Elaine Hess,63, and son David sued Philip Morris, makers of the Benson & Hedges that Stuart Hess smoked for more than 40 years, saying he bought into the company's decades of deceit and downplaying of health risks to promote sales of their deadly products.
The case was never about the money, Elaine Hess said.
"Nothing can make up for the loss," she said.
Richmond, Va.-based Philip Morris USA has vowed to appeal the verdict.
This is the first of about 8,000 individual lawsuits to go to trial since the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 threw out a record $145 billion class-action jury award.
Though the court tossed out the award, it upheld the jury's conclusions that tobacco companies misrepresented the addictive nature and concealed the health dangers of cigarettes.
Cigarette makers, lawyers and other Florida smokers and survivors who have filed similar suits watched the
Hess case as an indicator of how other cases might turn out.
However, Philip Morris said other cases might be unlikely to persuade other jurors.
“We do not believe today's verdict is predictive of outcomes in future cases," Murray Garnick, vice president and associate general counsel for Altria Client Services said on behalf of Philip Morris in a statement Wednesday. "This case was selected by plaintiffs' lawyers from among thousands of others to be the first tried presumably because they believed it was their best case."
Philip Morris attorneys argued that Stuart Hess made his own lifestyle choices and could have stopped smoking in time to avoid his death.
After deliberating for nearly nine hours over two days, the six-member panel awarded $2 million to Elaine Hess and $1 million to David Hess for their losses. It also said Philip Morris should pay $5 million in punitive damages.
Hess' attorneys said offered to settle for "far less" than the jury's award and are now entitled to add attorney's fees to the figure. They said they could not disclose the amount of the proposed settlement.
Article Copyright © 2009, Sun Sentinel |
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