Another article from the Yahoo Finance site:
Tuesday March 28, 6:59 pm Eastern Time
Lawyer in sick-smokers case attacks tobacco experts
By Michael Connor
MIAMI, March 28 (Reuters) - U.S. cigarette makers fighting a potentially crippling lawsuit did not produce a single credible expert to counter claims smoking causes cancer and other diseases, a plaintiffs lawyer said on Tuesday.
Attorney Stanley Rosenblatt, summing up in the high-stakes penalty phase of a landmark class-action lawsuit on behalf of as many as 1 million sick smokers in Florida, ridiculed expert defense witnesses as grossly overpaid and poorly qualified.
One physician called by cigarette companies was paid $105,000, had little or no expertise in tobacco issues, and was known for peddling on the Internet a program promising to cure depression in six weeks, Rosenblatt said.
Rosenblatt also told jurors, the same six who handed Philip Morris and other big cigarette companies a withering liability verdict in the case, that tobacco industry lawyers were trying to blame the throat cancer of one plaintiff on wood dust, rather than smoking, without any respectable
evidence.
``They're selling wood dust because they have nothing else to sell,' Rosenblatt said in Miami-Dade County Court.
The jurors, who have heard evidence in the case since October 1998, decided last July that Philip Morris (NYSE:MO - news) and other cigarette companies were liable for the smoking-related illnesses of hundreds of thousands of Floridians and knowingly hid tobacco's dangers for decades.
The six must now decide individual, or compensatory, damages for a former wood worker, a nurse and the husband of a woman who died last year from lung cancer.
If compensatory damages are awarded, the jurors will then decide punitive damages for the entire class.
Such a ruling could come within weeks and may go as high as $300 billion or more, a figure some on Wall Street fear could force tobacco companies to seek bankruptcy-court protection.
Tobacco lawyers were expected to make their closing arguments later this week. In recent weeks, they presented witnesses testifying that the lung cancer of one of the individual plaintiffs, Mary Farnan, may be of a sort the jurors last summer decided was not caused by smoking.
The so-called Engle class-action, named after a Miami Beach pediatrician with emphysema blamed on smoking, is just one battlefront in a broad courtroom war against U.S. cigarette makers.
On Monday, a San Francisco jury ordered Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc._(NYSE:RJR - news), also a defendant in the Engle case, to pay a dying ex-smoker and her husband $20 million in punitive damages.
The tobacco companies might as well paint a bulls-eye on their butts and tattoo the words, "Please sue me" on their foreheads.
The best part of course being the rest of the addicts will get to pay for it all. I wonder if cigarettes will someday be sold by the lid, or if laws will be passed for mandatory jail terms caught selling smuggled smokes within 1000 ft. of a school.
(logging off for a couple of hours) |
