IT’S BEEN DECADES since a wave of court cases began holding tobacco companies responsible for misrepresenting the dangers and addictive nature of cigarettes – and the hits to Big Tobacco keep coming.
Massachusetts’s highest court on Wednesday affirmed $56 million in punitive damages in a wrongful death suit against tobacco giant Philip Morris, rejecting the company’s argument that a jury’s initial $1 billion award was so extreme it demonstrated prejudice requiring a new trial.
The unanimous decision in Fontaine v. Philip Morris USA Inc. upheld every aspect of the verdict against Philip Morris, and the Supreme Judicial Court declined to adopt stricter procedural rules the company sought to make such awards harder to obtain in the future.
The 49-page opinion authored by Justice Gabrielle Wolohojian offered a withering description of the company’s actions that could reasonably have justified the huge punitive award.
“Here there was virtually uncontested evidence showing Philip Morris’s reprehensible conduct over decades,” she wrote. “This included purposely designing its product to be addictive, targeting its advertising to children, and misleading the public as to the health dangers of cigarettes, all with full knowledge that cigarettes were the cause of widespread preventable death.”
Juries considering damages awards in civil lawsuits typically consider two ways to hold a party to account: compensatory damages for the direct harm to an individual and people who relied on them, and punitive damages for particularly harmful or negligent behavior. Compensatory damages are designed to make up for what was lost, while punitive damages are meant to deter similar harmful behavior in the future.
Lawmakers have decided not to create a hard cap for punitive damages, Wolohojian noted. Given the evidence before them, a jury could reasonably conclude that the company’s conduct was “extremely reprehensible” and offer a large punitive award as an exercise of “sound discretion” rather than “passion and prejudice,” she wrote.
A jury in 2022 found Philip Morris liable for the death of Barbara Fontaine, a Middlesex County woman who began smoking the company’s Marlboro and Parliament cigarettes at 15 years old. She became addicted and smoked more than a pack a day for over 40 years before dying of lung cancer at 60, according to the court. She left behind her husband Armand, who brought the suit, and their two children.
Philip Morris did not dispute that its cigarettes caused Fontaine’s death. Rather, the tobacco company’s attorneys argued she was an intelligent woman who understood the risks, pointed to warning labels and health education she had received, and noted she had ultimately managed to quit in 2015 when a doctor refused to perform a procedure on her unless she stopped smoking.
After deliberating three days, however, the jury awarded roughly $8 million in compensatory damages, including $2.5 million for Barbara’s pain and suffering. But Philip Morris zeroed in on the jury’s $1 billion award in punitive damages, which was the largest ever returned by a Massachusetts jury. There are legal limits on how high punitive damages can go – seven times the compensatory damages – so the Superior Court judge reduced the punitive figure to about $56 million.
The attorney for the Fontaine family, Celene Humphries, noted that the ultimate award “didn’t even amount to 17 days of revenue” for Philip Morris – shorter than the trial itself.
But the jury had swung for a billion, and Philip Morris argued unsuccessfully before the trial court that the sheer size of the original verdict proved the jury had been swept up by passion and prejudice. The lower court judge reduced the punitive award, in line with constitutional guidelines, but rejected the company’s request for a new trial because of the punitive award size.
The company’s attorney, Scott Chesin, reiterated the point before the SJC, arguing that compared to similar cases $1 billion “is so outrageously larger than anything that’s ever happened before that makes the process suspect in particular.”
The SJC was unmoved, finding the trial judge had plenty of reasons to reject that theory.
The judge concluded that the jury was attentive throughout the four-week trial, asked pointed questions, made nuanced distinctions in damages among Fontaine’s family members, awarded less in compensatory damages than the plaintiffs requested, and found in favor of a supermarket codefendant who was also sued along with Philip Morris.
The parent company of Philip Morris did not immediately respond to request for comment.
In its Wednesday decision, the SJC also waved away two procedural changes that the tobacco company wanted.
Chesin had urged the court to require separate trials to keep information about a defendant’s wealth away from juries during the liability phase – so juries might be less likely to award a higher amount if the defendant has deep pockets – and to impose a higher evidence standard for punitive damages.
The justices waved away the arguments, because a judge already has the option to decide to split a trial into parts if it makes sense in specific case. And the SJC said the existing evidence bar is adequate for awarding punitive damages.
