J.B. Harris [Managing Partner, The Law Offices of J.B. Harris, P.A.]: "On May 22, 2009, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in large part one of the most damning verdicts ever rendered against the tobacco industry. US v. Philip Morris USA Inc., et. al. [PDF file]. Upholding the liability findings of District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, set forth in her massive 1600 page opinion, the appeals court affirmed that Philip Morris USA, Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Lorillard Tobacco Company, The Liggett Group, Inc., and others had violated certain sections of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO).

Relying on live testimony from 84 witnesses, written testimony from 162 and 14,000 documents, Judge Kessler, following a bench trial, had concluded that cigarette manufacturers and their two nefarious trade organizations, the Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research, had joined together in a decades-long conspiracy to deceive the American public about the health effects and addictiveness of smoking cigarettes.

Specifically, Judge Kessler found the cigarette companies had fraudulently denied that (i) smoking causes cancer and emphysema; (ii) secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and endangers children's respiratory and auditory systems; (iii) nicotine is an addictive drug and that the tobacco companies manipulated it to sustain addiction; (iv) light and low tar cigarettes are not less harmful than full flavor cigarettes; (v) Defendants intentionally marketed cigarettes to youth; and (vi) that they concealed evidence and destroyed documents to hide the dangers of smoking and to protect themselves in litigation.

Mirroring Judge Kessler's findings is the equally damning case of Engle v. Liggett et al. [PDF file]. Originally brought by Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt in Miami-Dade Circuit Court as a national class action in 1994, later reduced to a statewide class in 1996, a jury ultimately returned a record punitive damage award against the tobacco companies in the amount of $145 billion following a year-long trial. After twelve years of appeals, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the punitive damage award as being excessive, and decertified the class on the grounds that individual damages were too discrete to be part of a class. This opened the door for class members to file individual claims in Florida. Currently, about 8000 Engle progeny cases are pending across the state.

While the Florida Supreme Court took away the punitive damage award and decertified the class, like the DC Appeals Court, it let stand the Engle jury's unprecedented findings that the tobacco companies committed fraud, were negligent and concealed from consumers the addictive nature and dangers of smoking in order to sell more cigarettes.

The jury also found that cigarettes cause a variety of illnesses, including aortic aneurysm, bladder cancer, cerebrovascular disease, cervical cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; coronary heart disease; esophageal cancer; kidney cancer; laryngeal cancer; lung cancer (specifically, adenocarcinoma, large cell carcinoma, small cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma); complications of pregnancy; oral cavity — tongue cancer; pancreatic cancer; stomach cancer; and peripheral vascular disease. Moreover, these findings are binding as res judicata in all Engle progeny cases, meaning plaintiffs need only prove they were addicted to cigarettes and suffered tobacco related illnesses in order to be eligible for compensation.

Having closed both the federal and state loops on tobacco companies' wrongdoing, the task of tobacco trial lawyers in Florida and elsewhere is to enlighten juries and even judges about the depth of the tobacco industry's deceit. As a Florida personal injury attorney representing 157 Engle progeny clients, the Appeal Court's ruling has just made the challenge of overcoming juror bias against smokers that much easier.

Also known as the ""you screwed up by trusting us" defense, tobacco companies continue to blame smokers for the sickness and death caused by addiction to nicotine. Many jurors accept this argument by viewing the facts solely through a personal responsibility or choice lens. In other words, smokers choose to smoke and could choose to quit if they wanted to. Blindly accepting this argument ignores the extent to which tobacco companies have historically gone to addict minors – before the legal age of reason – especially during the pre-Surgeon General warning era. In other words, cigarette makers chose subterfuge over safety in the unbridled marketing of their products.

Targeting children, "Negroes," Hispanics, Asians, American Indians and poor Whites, tobacco companies gave away free cigarettes to inner-city kids, to folks at church and social events and at dance parties, street fairs and the like. They also sponsored sporting events like Virginia Slims Women's Tennis, NASCAR racing, baseball games, soccer matches and other sporting events. They even gave away free cigarettes to soldiers shipping out to war during World War II and beyond. In short, their advertising campaigns were systematic, methodical, contrived and diabolical. They were calculated to turn children and young adults into lifelong customers and they succeeded.

What these innocent victims later discovered, however, and what juries are now coming to understand is that nicotine, the addictive agent in every cigarette, is as powerful as cocaine and heroin. Targeting the same receptors in the brain, its potency can also be manipulated. Indeed, the tobacco companies discovered that spiking cigarettes with ammonia forced smokers to unknowingly freebase nicotine, making it virtually impossible for them to quit once addicted, causing them to crave ever larger and more frequent doses of the drug. Under this level of duress the element of choice is completely obliterated as the brain's frontal lobe distress warning system is short-circuited by addiction.

It is against this backdrop that individual smokers in Florida, and hopefully elsewhere, will have their day in court and that justice and compensation will be awarded to those who have suffered the greatest scourge this country has ever seen. So far the results have been promising. The first Engle progeny verdict resulted in an $8 million verdict, including a $5 million punitive damage component, clearly indicating that jurors, once apprised of the facts, see straight through the tobacco companies' smoke screen.

For those who are sick and dying, and for those whose families carry on the battle in their absence, the Engle and DC Appeal Courts' rulings stand as monuments to transparency that will provide beacons of hope and truth to all who think the deck is stacked against them, that the system is broken and that they could have stopped smoking had they only chosen to do so."