Legal experts said that thousands of tobacco lawsuits could gain momentum in Florida after a Fort Lauderdale jury ordered Philip Morris USA to pay US$300 million to a former smoker who says she needs a lung transplant.
If it survives an appeal, the verdict late on Thursday would be the nation’s largest award of damages to an individual suing a tobacco company and could encourage thousands of plaintiffs who have filed similar cases in Florida, said Clifford Douglas of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network.
A state supreme court ruling in Florida a few years ago made it easier to pursue tobacco lawsuits than in other states.
But the tobacco industry, which plans to appeal, appeared unfazed. Tobacco companies have considered product liability suits as little more than a cost of doing business since the seven biggest companies agreed to pay US$206 billion in a master settlement agreement with 46 states in 1998.
Florida, despite being one of those states, had a major legal ruling in 2006 that lowered a plaintiff’s burden of proof against a tobacco company.
The Florida Supreme Court rejected a class-action verdict and a US$145 billion award to plaintiffs, saying smokers would have to sue individually. But the court said plaintiffs would not have to prove some key elements that had been upheld in the first stage of the class action: that nicotine is addictive, that smoking causes diseases and that cigarette companies fraudulently hid those facts.
“That makes these cases in Florida unique,” Douglas said.
Smokers in other states are still suing cigarette makers, he said, but they have more hurdles.
A spokesman for Altria Group, the Virginia-based parent company of Philip Morris USA, said it would appeal the verdict and said the Florida rules were “fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional.”
Shares of Altria, which were up more than 27 percent this year, dropped 1.2 percent on Friday.
Lucinda Naugle, the 61-year-old sister of a former Fort Lauderdale mayor, was awarded US$56 million in compensatory damages and US$244 million in punitive damages on Thursday after a three-week trial and three hours of jury deliberation in Broward County Circuit Court.
Naugle, an office manager, had started smoking when she was 20 and quit when she was 45 years old, her lawyer, Robert Kelley of Fort Lauderdale, said in a telephone interview Friday. She now has severe emphysema and needs a lung transplant she cannot afford, he said.
The jury assigned her 10 percent of the liability for her smoking and disease, and Philip Morris 90 percent.
“She’ll get paid, I would hope, within a year or two,” Kelley said. “The question is will she live long enough.”
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