John Uustal, left; William Geraghty, center; and Jose Isasi deliver closing arguments in an Illinois state court trial involving a pair of smokers who claim Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds are responsible for their cancers. Watch the trial.
Chicago, IL — Jurors late last month found Philip Morris responsible for the diseases a pair of long-time smokers suffered, but cleared co-defendant R.J. Reynolds in a trial consolidating the plaintiffs’ claims. Ogbebor v. Philip Morris USA, et al., 2023-L-605, and Thompson v. Philip Morris USA Inc., et al., 2023-L-843.
The Cook County, Illinois Circuit Court jury concluded a 12-day trial on September 25 by finding Philip Morris liable for the lung cancer Sharon Ogbebor developed after years of smoking the company’s Virginia Slims cigarettes. In the companion case, the jury determined the company was at fault for the laryngeal cancer Howard Thompson suffered following decades of smoking the company’s Marlboros.
However, jurors found Ogbebor herself 30% responsible for her illness, reducing the $1.43 million damage award in the case to roughly $1 million. Jurors apportioned 40% of responsibility to Thompson for his disease, reducing the $1.17 million damage award to roughly $700,000.
The jury cleared R.J. Reynolds of responsibility in each case, rejected the plaintiffs’ fraud claims, and declined to award any punitive damages.
While the details of each case were unique, the broad claims and defenses were similar. Both Ogbebor and Thompson claim Philip Morris and Reynolds were negligent in the design of cigarettes that were dangerous and addictive and improperly marketed those cigarettes while working to undercut scientific evidence of smoking’s risks. Trial in each case focused largely on what drove the respective smokers’ decisions throughout their lives.
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Ogbebor tried her first cigarette around 1977 when she was 16, and ultimately smoked for more than 30 years. While she quit cigarettes temporarily on at least one occasion, she quit for good in late 2012.
Meanwhile, Thompson says he began smoking around 1980 when he was roughly 14, quitting for a time after he suffered a leg injury around 2002, before returning to smoking.
During his closing statement on behalf of the plaintiffs, Kelley | Uustal’s John Uustal walked jurors through evidence that he said showed the companies marketed to youth with an aim toward keeping them smokers for decades. Uustal added the companies controlled the levels of addictive nicotine in their products and undermined public health messaging on smoking’s dangers.
Uustal said Ogbebor and Thompson were caught in this initiative, beginning to smoke as children and then struggling to quit throughout their lives.
“[T]hey became nicotine addicts as children, when they were targeted for that nicotine addiction,” Uustal said. “And the industry very perceptively and intelligently… understood how to appeal to the nicotine addicts.”
But in his closing, Philip Morris’ attorney, Wilkinson Stekloff’s William Geraghty, argued that both Ogbebor and Thompson knew that cigarettes were dangerous but chose to smoke, despite the risks. Geraghty pointed out that warning labels were on every pack of cigarettes either plaintiff smoked and that both of them were repeatedly warned by family, medical professionals and others.
Geraghty added that Ogbebor had ignored health warnings for years and ultimately quit cigarettes for good because she didn’t like the smell of the smoke on her clothes. Meanwhile, he said, Thompson was warned for decades by doctors but had no desire to quit for good in time to avoid his throat cancer.
“Was each plaintiff not responsible for the decisions he or she made to smoke every single day, for literally decades, in the face of all those warnings?” Geraghty asked.
In his closing, R.J. Reynolds’ attorney, Jones Day’s Jose Isasi, told jurors neither plaintiff smoked enough Reynolds cigarettes to have contributed meaningfully to their cancers. Isasi reminded jurors of evidence that Ogbebor smoked perhaps half a pack of Reynolds’ Salem brand cigarettes for less than two years before beginning to smoke Virginia Slims. And he said Thompson only had a Reynolds-brand cigarette a day for roughly a week before starting on Marlboros.
“Plaintiffs’ own experts agree that limited amounts of smoking like that could not have caused their cancers,” Isasi said.
The proceeding is among the first civil trials covered with video in Cook County Circuit Court, and it is the first Chicago trial captured by CVN cameras. In January of this year, an Illinois Supreme Court Media policy on video coverage, which had been in effect on a limited basis, expanded to courts throughout the state.
Email Arlin Crisco at acrisco@cvn.com.
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Watch the trial to see how the parties argued the issues of comparative fault in the case.
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