The jury in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has ordered Philip Morris to pay USD 8 million in damages to Elaine Hess, the widow of long-time smoker Stuart Hess, who died of lung cancer in 1997 at age 55. He had smoked for 40 years.
The Hess trial was the first of about 8,000 cases filed following the Florida Supreme Court's landmark decision in 2006 to throw out a USD 145 billion (EUR 114.6 billion) jury award in a class-action lawsuit filed in the early 1990s by Miami Beach pediatrician Howard Engle on behalf of thousands of sick smokers.
The ruling came in the first phase of what could be a three-phase trial. Lawyers for Hess were initially required to show that Hess' death was caused by addiction to cigarettes. The next phase is to decide compensatory damages and entitlement to punitive damages. Lawyers for Elaine Hess argued that Stuart Hess tried but failed to quit smoking because he was addicted to nicotine. Philip Morris lawyers argued that he could have quit.
“The Hess trial is not over," Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group, said in a statement. "The jury has decided only the threshold question of whether the plaintiff can proceed in this case as a former member of the Engle class."
In its 2006 ruling that threw out the USD 145 billion lower-court award in the Engle case – the first smokers lawsuit to be certified as a class action – the state Supreme Court left in place key findings that tobacco firms knowingly sold dangerous products and concealed the risks of smoking. That promised to help the thousands of smokers who filed individual lawsuits against the tobacco firms because they would not have to prove those issues again. (pi)