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Non-Tech : Philip Morris - A Stock For Wealth Or Poverty (MO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hopkins who wrote (3471)	3/30/1999 3:39:00 PM
From: Little Gorilla	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6439

Tuesday March 30, 3:24 pm Eastern Time Jury Awards $81M in Tobacco Lawsuit PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- A jury ordered a cigarette maker to pay a record $81 million Tuesday to the family of a man who died of lung cancer after smoking Marlboros for four decades. It was the biggest verdict ever won by an individual in a smoking liability case. The court victory by the wife and children of Jesse Williams, who died in 1997, was the second major hit against Philip Morris this year. A San Francisco jury awarded $51.5 million last month to a Marlboro smoker who has inoperable lung cancer. Although no similar verdict against the tobacco industry has survived on appeal, Wall Street analysts were watching the Portland case closely to see if public opinion had turned. The Williams family, who sought $101 million, alleged the company knew its cigarettes could cause cancer. Testimony portrayed Williams, a former janitor with the Portland school system, as a three-pack-day Marlboro smoker who believed the manufacturer wouldn't sell a harmful product and who was heavily addicted to nicotine. Williams died just five months after he was diagnosed with small-cell carcinoma of the lungs. He was 67 and left behind a wife, Mayola Williams, and six adult children. The 12-member Circuit Court jury, which included three smokers and four former smokers, spent a little more than two days reviewing a month of technical and often conflicting testimony from experts in such areas as cancer diagnosis, radiology and the chemistry of tobacco smoke. Much of the medical testimony on both sides was aimed at showing that Williams' cancer arose either before or after 1988. If the jury concluded that Williams' cancer was caused by cigarettes smoked before 1988, Philip Morris couldn't be held liable under Oregon law. That's because Oregon law allows plaintiffs to seek damages going back only eight years before the filing of a product liability suit. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------