Madeline
Rookie
- Banned
- #1
Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. must pay $80 million to the daughter of a man who died of lung cancer 60 years after he started smoking as a teenager in the 1930s, a jury in Florida ruled.
The jury in Levy County yesterday awarded $8 million in compensatory damages and $72 million in punitive damages to Dianne Webb, the adult daughter of James Cayce Horner, who died at the age of 78 in 1996, according to court records and a statement from the law firm that won the case, Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley.
The case is Dianne Webb v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 382009CA001285, Florida Circuit Court (Levy County).
The verdict comes four days after a Miami-Dade County jury decided in favor of Altria’s Philip Morris USA. That verdict was the eighth courtroom victory for tobacco companies in Florida since the end of August, Philip Morris said in a statement. The industry faces thousands of smoker-liability cases in Florida because of a decision by the state’s Supreme Court.
Since February 2009, jurors in Florida have awarded than $310 million to smokers and their families. The plaintiffs in the cases sued after the Florida Supreme Court decertified a statewide smokers’ class action in 2006, Gustafson said.
R.J. Reynolds Ordered to Pay $80 Million by Jury - BusinessWeek
Florida has some liability law most other states do not have. As a rule, to hold a defendant liable for damages you must prove that the product they manufacture caused the harm. To get the state's own Tobacco Litigation moved forward, the Florida legislature adopted an alternative theory: you need merely prove the defendant's market share of all similar products, not that its products actually caused the harm. (I do not know whether all the states involved in the Tobacco Litigation enacted such laws; they may have....but Florida has always been the focus of analysis of this emerging law.)
Before you applaud this and declare the tobacco industry dead on its feet, most legal scholars believe that if the Florida Tobacco causation law is constitutional, it cannot be applied only to tobacco. So, a gun and ammo manufacturer could be made to pay (especially if sued by the states, seeking to recover health care costs for GSW victims) based on its market share without any evidence that its products were the agents of harm. Guns, pharmacuetical drugs, medical devices, "defective" cars, etc. Sky's the limit, IMO. It has not yet happened, to my knowledge, but it is virtually inevitable.....no law on liability and causation can be made to apply only to tobacco.
This seems to me to be industry-killing by civil litigation, with a ginormous pot of gold for the plaintiffs and their lawyers. Are we really better off if the assets of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. are liquidated and paid over to Dianne Webb and her lawyers, Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley? Will they employ as many people? Pay as much in taxes?
This makes even less sense to me than outright nationalization/condemnation the industry would make.
Your thoughts?