Altria Group Inc., the biggest U.S. cigarette maker, must pay $8 million to the family of a smoker who died of lung cancer, a Florida jury ruled in the first of 8,000 individual cases over the company's products to go to trial in the state, Bloomberg reported.
A state court jury in Fort Lauderdale ruled today Altria's Philip Morris USA unit is liable for $3 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages over Stuart Hess's 1997 death. The family's lawyer told jurors during the two-week trial that Hess, 55, "choked his life away" smoking the company's cigarettes from age 15. Altria makes Marlboro and Virginia Slims cigarettes.
The verdict is the first in thousands of lawsuits filed after the Florida Supreme Court threw out a $145 billion punitive-damages verdict awarded by a Miami jury to a statewide class of smokers in 2006. Florida's high court, which ruled the smokers can't sue as a group, extended the time for individual smokers to sue and allowed them to rely in their individual cases on factual findings by the Miami jury, including that cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer.
"We're going to file an appeal. We'll defend it vigorously like we have in all other cases," said Kenneth Reilly, Altria's attorney.
Reilly told jurors the Hess family was seeking "an enormous amount" in the case and said he was relying on their "sound judgment" on the issue of whether the company should pay damages.
The family's lawyers urged the Broward County Circuit Court jury in closing arguments in the damages phase of the case yesterday to award Hess's wife and son about $132 million in total damages over his death.
"An award of only $5 million to $10 million would not mean that much to them," Gary Paige, the family's lawyer, told the panel. He also asked jurors to make their verdict large enough to put other corporations "on notice" about the consequences of selling deadly products.
The case is Elaine Hess v. Phillip Morris, CA 07-11513, Broward County Circuit Court (Fort Lauderdale).