Tobacco Industry Suits

Mississippi Atty. Gen. Michael Moore announced Thursday that the state has settled its landmark health care lawsuit against the tobacco industry for nearly $3.4 billion, guaranteeing one of the nation's poorest states a major cash infusion regardless of whether Congress ultimately enacts legislation resolving tobacco litigation around the country.

A California congressman on Thursday asked the Justice Department to investigate claims that a tobacco industry group destroyed up to 1 million pages of internal documents in Europe to keep them out of the hands of legal opponents in the U.S. In a letter to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) called for an investigation of allegations by a tobacco insider, Ron Tully, who during the 1990s headed the Tobacco Documentation Centre, an industry group in Britain.

Seeking to stop the federal government's lawsuit against the tobacco industry, key Senate Republicans are lining up behind a provision that could stymie the Justice Department's ability to defend or prosecute most major civil litigation. The provision, expected to be taken up by the Senate this week, is buried in the massive 2001 spending bill for the Department of Agriculture.

The tobacco industry filed its appeal Monday in the trial that produced a record $145-billion verdict for sick Florida smokers, claiming pretrial decisions and the two-year trial were riddled with legal flaws. The nation's biggest cigarette makers challenged decisions grouping all of the smokers in a single class-action lawsuit and attacked the punitive damage award as "bankrupting and excessive."

The government filed its massive lawsuit against the tobacco industry Wednesday to recover smoking-related health care costs and immediately stood accused of hypocrisy for suing an industry that it had supported for decades. Cigarette makers denounced the suit and vowed never to settle out of court, as they did for a whopping $246 billion when sued by the states.

Hours before a jury was to begin deliberations, the tobacco industry agreed Friday to pay $6.6 billion to settle a massive lawsuit filed against it by the state of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota. The industry also agreed to a landmark nationwide ban on the much-criticized practice of making payments to movie, television and video producers to feature smoking by actors in their productions.

A San Francisco judge Tuesday cut in half a landmark $50-million punitive damages award against Philip Morris but excoriated the firm and denied its request to retry the case of a former Marlboro smoker who contracted lung cancer. The ruling by San Francisco Superior Court Judge John E. Munter means that the nation's biggest tobacco company must pay $26.5 million to Patricia Henley of Los Angeles--including $1.5 million in compensatory and $25 million in punitive damages.

Philip Morris Chairman Geoffrey C. Bible, continuing his testimony Tuesday in a big tobacco trial here, was confronted with a blizzard of internal company memos concerning the narcotic effects of smoking, including one document that compared nicotine to morphine and cocaine, and described cigarettes as "nicotine delivery devices" along with nicotine patches and gum.

It's no surprise that cigarette makers and anti-tobacco law firms are lobbying hard in Congress for the giant tobacco truce. The deal would give the former crucial legal protections and the latter fat fees. But from the nooks and crannies of the economy, a hodgepodge of groups whose stake in the outcome is less apparent also is competing for lawmakers' attention--ranging from insurance giant Aetna and the hotel workers union to pint-sized cigarette marketer Single Stick.

Scanning his newspaper one day in 1991, Norman Braun was amazed to read that Kent cigarettes--once touted as offering "the greatest health protection in cigarette history"--had contained a particularly virulent form of asbestos. He clipped and mailed the article to his sons, along with a note: "I smoked these damn cigarettes." Still, Braun felt more indignant than fearful.

Will the tobacco industry face a tsunami of lawsuits in California, and the risk of billions of dollars in liability? Or will high court rulings eliminate the threat, making the hostility of jurors irrelevant? Three consecutive mega-verdicts against cigarette makers have put California in the forefront of the legal war over smoking. The first of them--a $26.5-million damages award against Philip Morris Inc.

A federal jury in Ohio rejected the claims for damages sought by the wife of a former smoker who died in 1996, four years after he contracted lung cancer. The jury ruled unanimously against Jocelyn Tompkin in a lawsuit that alleged that her husband, David, had developed lung cancer while using cigarettes produced by various tobacco companies from 1950 to 1965, according to a court clerk.

Two men have admitted to trying to sell the plaintiffs' trial strategy plans to tobacco industry lawyers in a high-stakes case, federal prosecutors said. Said Farraj, 28, a former paralegal at the New York office of Orrick, Harrington & Sutcliffe, and his brother Yeazid, 25, pleaded guilty to the scheme in separate federal court appearances, they said.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit against the tobacco industry by Washington state public hospitals that sought to recoup the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses. The justices, without comment, let stand a lower court decision dismissing the antitrust and racketeering case against Philip Morris Cos., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and other companies. The U.S.

Regular cigarettes and those touted as "light" are essentially the same, and low-tar cigarettes are no safer than any other kind, a witness who has studied smoking for decades testified. Jack Henningfield, a consultant from Bethesda, Md., was the first witness to struggle within the confines of a carefully constructed class-action case in which about 250,000 healthy West Virginia smokers are suing the tobacco industry for an unprecedented medical monitoring program.

An appeals court denied a request Monday for damages by the widow of a three-pack-a-day smoker, ruling that it was the state-owned tobacco company's job to make money for the government. The company, Seita, "was not unaware of the correlation between smoking and the risk of cancer, notably of the lungs," the court said. But it said Seita's status as a state-run company did not permit it to "make this information known to the public."

State attorneys general are optimistic about talks with the tobacco industry over settling suits for the costs of treating sick smokers despite Massachusetts' withdrawal from the negotiations. The closed-door discussions, which resumed last week after a three-week break, are expected to start again in New York on Wednesday.

Tobacco companies scored a legal victory Friday in San Francisco, where a state appeals court ruled that sick smokers whose ailments were diagnosed before 1998 could not file injury suits. The ruling stems from a 1988 California law that granted cigarette makers near-immunity from suits by ailing smokers. The law was changed in 1998 to allow such cases to be filed.

The Bush administration and cigarette makers stand so far apart in efforts to settle a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the tobacco industry that the Justice Department has shelved further negotiations for now, a senior department official disclosed Wednesday.

A landmark lawsuit in West Virginia aimed at forcing the tobacco industry to provide free annual medical tests for healthy smokers is a potential minefield for the dozens of witnesses expected to testify. Jury selection begins Wednesday in the class-action lawsuit, which has been carefully structured with restrictions on what can and cannot be said to preserve its status as a class action.