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West Palm Beach, FL— R.J. Reynolds Monday prevailed at trial seeking punitive damages for the respiratory disease a Florida man developed after decades of smoking. Spurlock v. R.J. Reynolds, 2007-CA-023631.
The Florida, 15th Circuit state court jury, deliberated roughly three hours before concluding Reynolds was not liable for punitive damages for its role in the respiratory disease Lloyd Spurlock developed after more than half a century of smoking.
The decision comes three years after another jury found the cigarette maker responsible for Spurlock’s chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, and awarded $2.54 million, including $2 million in punitives. However, last year, the state’s Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed that earlier jury’s findings as to punitive damages, setting up the latest proceeding focused only on the issue of civil punishment.
Spurlock, who was born in 1934, tried his first cigarette at 8, and was a regular smoker by the early 1950s, favoring Reynolds’ Winston-brand cigarettes through much of his life. He was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, in 1995, and died in 2012 for reasons unrelated to the disease.
His family contends that Reynolds’ conduct, including making cigarettes it knew were dangerous and addictive, warranted imposing a punitive verdict against the company.
During Monday’s closings, Eaton & Wolk’s Doug Eaton, representing Spurlock’s family, walked jurors through evidence he said showed Reynolds sold and continues to sell cigarettes that are addictive and cause respiratory and other diseases, despite the possibility of safer alternatives, such as products that heat but do not burn tobacco or cigarettes where addictive nicotine is removed.
“Their customers want to stop using it, they can’t. [Reynolds] can’t make a product that will allow their customers to stop,” Eaton said after highlighting a Reynolds internal memo from 1982 focused on maintaining addictive levels of nicotine in cigarettes. “And they still won’t.”
But the defense argues punitives are not warranted, contending that cigarettes are inherently dangerous. And during his closing Monday, King & Spalding’s Philip Green told jurors there was no evidence to show that Reynolds designed their cigarettes to be any more dangerous than the risks inherent when inhaling the smoke from burning tobacco.
“[Reynolds] did not make them more dangerous. They did not make them more addictive,” Green said. “How could [plaintiffs] possibly meet their burden of proof to show that conduct warrants punitive damages? It’s a simple answer: they can’t.”
The case is one of thousands spun from Engle v. Liggett Group Inc., a Florida state court class-action lawsuit originally filed in 1994. After a trial victory for the class members, the state’s supreme court ultimately decertified the class, but ruled that so-called Engle progeny cases may be tried individually.
Engle progeny plaintiffs are entitled to the benefit of the jury's findings in the original verdict, including the determination that tobacco companies had placed a dangerous, addictive product on the market and hid the dangers of smoking, if they prove the smoker at the heart of the case suffered from nicotine addiction that was the legal cause of a smoking-related disease. Jurors in the first trial found in favor of Spurlock's family on the class membership issue.
Email Arlin Crisco at acrisco@cvn.com.
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