At one point, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. suggested the real culprit was the Federal Trade Commission. This agency oversees the warning labels on cigarettes, he noted, and it allowed the cigarette makers to tout the data from the machine tests indicating "light" cigarettes emitted less tar.
"If these figures are misleading, then you should have prohibited them a long time ago," Alito told an FTC lawyer. "You have created this whole problem by, I think, passively approving the placement of these figures in the advertisements [in the packaging]. You have misled everybody who's bought those cigarettes for a long time," he said.
The FTC lawyer replied that the agency itself had been fooled because tobacco companies had hidden research data indicating that smokers did not benefit from switching to light or low-tar cigarettes.
Also on Monday, the justices turned down without comment hundreds of appeal petitions which had piled up over the summer. In doing so, they let stand several noteworthy rulings.
In Arizona, an antiabortion group had won a free-speech right to obtain license plates with the message "Choose Life." The state permits private groups to obtain special plates, so long as they meet several basic criteria, and because the antiabortion group qualified, its message should not be censored, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said in the Stanton vs. Arizona Life Coalition case.
The court also let stand rulings that allow juries in Louisiana and Oregon to convict defendants even when they are not unanimous in their verdicts. In the past, the court said the Constitution does not require unanimous verdicts in all cases. They refused to reconsider that issue in the case of a Louisiana murderer in the Lee vs. Louisiana ruling.
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david.savage@latimes.com
