Attorneys Robert Maddox and Jamie Carsey deliver their opening statements in Reimers v. Everest. Click here to see video from the trial. Click here for a copy of the complaint. 

Reno - Opening statements began Tuesday in a $5 million class action in Nevada state court accusing Everest Indemnity Insurance Co. of acting in bad faith by refusing to cover defense costs in an underlying suit brought by hundreds of homeowners who claimed a developer’s poorly designed drains caused flooding after a levee collapse.

Edward Caprio v. Philip Morris, et al. 

Fort Lauderdale—As trial opened Wednesday, Edward Caprio's lawyer, Steven Hammer, told jurors how he believed an addiction to nicotine, not a choice to smoke, left his client tied to an oxygen tank and unable to successfully quit cigarettes until last month, years after he had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. 

"It's been said that silence is golden, but for Ed (Caprio), when he's sleeping, if this (Oxygen) machine shuts down, and becomes silent, it's a death sentence," Hammer said. "Nobody chooses to be strapped to an oxygen machine. Nobody chooses to walk around with a walker, strapped to an oxygen tank," Hammer, of the Law Offices of Sheldon J. Schlesinger, said. 

Caprio 72, is suing Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard and the Liggett Group, makers of the cigarettes he claims led to his COPD and eventual lung cancer. Caprio claims he began smoking when he was 15, and argues that his nicotine addiction was so powerful that he was unable to completely give up smoking, even after being diagnosed with COPD in 1996 and subsequent lung cancer.

Hammer told jurors that Caprio's nicotine addiction was fueled by tobacco industry's "engineering" of cigarettes and its concealment of smoking's dangers in order to maintain and increase market share. "If you don't sustain that addiction, you lose customers," Hammer said. "And that's what's important to these companies, their customers. Not the health of the customers, but the money of the customers."

However, Philip Morris attorney Walter Cofer, of Shook Hardy Bacon, countered that Caprio successfully stopped smoking decades ago, when he went without cigarettes for six months during the 1980s. Cofer told jurors Thursday that the six-month period was more than enough time to move through the typical nicotine withdrawal period. Cofer told jurors that Caprio's decision to resume smoking was based on a choice and that it was that decision that led to his lung cancer and COPD. "How would things be different if in the 1980s, when Mr. Caprio... went without smoking for six months, (he'd) stayed quit? The answer is simple: we wouldn't be here," Cofer said. 

Neither the parties' attorneys nor tobacco company representatives could be reached for comment. 

Coming next week: Caprio's attorneys will move into the central issues of their case. 

The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington D.C. honors the civil rights leader. A trial in Atlanta is scheduled for February to determine the fate of his Nobel Peace Prize and traveling Bilble.

Atlanta—A week before the Academy Awards honors Selma, the acclaimed film focusing on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic civil rights march to Montgomery, Alabama, a trial is scheduled that pits the civil rights leader’s children against one another to determine the future of the civil rights leader’s iconic possessions. Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. Bernice King,  2014CV241929

King’s sons, Dexter and Martin Luther King III, representing King’s estate, have sued their sister, Dr. Bernice King, CEO of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, seeking to recover their father’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and his traveling Bible. The suit stems from a decision last year by the estate’s executive board, comprised of the three children, in which King’s two sons voted to sell the Bible and Peace Prize. Bernice King, whose King Center had held the property on loan from the estate, refused.

Trial in the case is scheduled to begin February 16 in Fulton County Superior Court before Judge Robert McBurney, while the property remains in court possession.

The suit is one of a number of disputes among the siblings concerning their father’s property, though at least one suit between the parties has resolved. Last Thursday, the estate announced it had dropped its claim seeking to revoke the King Center’s right to use the civil right’s leader’s name and image unless Bernice King was removed as its CEO. That suit alleged that historically important documents had been left unsecured and susceptible to mold, mildew, and theft.

Beyond the lasting historical significance of the items at the center of the current litigation—King’s traveling Bible was used when President Barack Obama took his Oath of Office in 2012—millions of dollars are at stake. An Associated Press story reports that the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize alone could sell for up to $20 million if King’s sons prevail in their claim.

King, who was assassinated in 1968, left no will. His estate passed from his widow, Coretta Scott King, to King’s children upon her death in 2006. That year King’s heirs sold a collection of more than 10,000 of his personal documents for $32 million. That collection is now housed at the civil rights leader’s alma mater, Morehouse College, according to the AP.

CVN will cover the case as it progresses.