BOSTON (Legal Newsline) – Tobacco giant Philip Morris hasn’t been punished enough, the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled.
Though a wrongful death lawsuit brought nearly 20 years after the company agreed to pay billions to every state to offset smoking-related costs on their health care systems, those plaintiffs were still allowed to pursue punitive damages, the court decided Sept. 15.
The closely watched case affirms a $10 million punitive damages award that came on top of $11 million in compensatory damages for widow Pamela Laramie, who blamed Philip Morris for the death of her husband Fred.
Filing amicus briefs in the case were state Attorney General Maura Healey, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, the Product Liability Advisory Council, the Public Health Advocacy Institute and the Washington Legal Foundation.
“(T)he plaintiff’s interest in an award of punitive damages was not a general interest in punishing Philip Morris for selling defective Marlboro cigarettes or in recovering for harms to the public at large; rather, the plaintiff asserted a personal interest, tied to punishing Philip Morris for the harm its conduct specifically inflicted on the plaintiff’s husband,” Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote.
“This interest in punitive damages was not adequately represented by the Attorney General in the prior action.”
That prior action was a landmark settlement in the late 1990s of around $250 billion that supplied personal injury lawyers who scored government contracts with billions in fees. And apparently, it did not free tobacco companies from further punishment in Massachusetts.
“To be sure, where a State litigates on behalf of its citizens’ ‘common public rights,’ judgments resulting from such litigation will bind the State’s citizens and, as to those rights, will have preclusive effect,” Wendlandt wrote.
“Such litigation does not, however, bar citizens from recovering for injuries to private interests.”
Punishment in the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was tied to the harm companies allegedly inflicted on states in the form of health care costs, the decision says.
The agreement preserved the rights of individual smokers to bring personal injury claims.
“This reservation indicates that the Attorney General did not understand himself to be acting on behalf of any individual smoker, or as a personal representative of a smoker, with respect to that interest,” the decision says.
“Although Philip Morris contends that the so-called ‘carve-out’ was limited to claims for compensatory damages, the settlement agreement contains no such limitation.”
Scoring the victory was Florida lawyer Celene Humphries of Brannock Humphries & Berman.