A Californian jury yesterday ordered Philip Morris to pay a former smoker with inoperable cancer $50 million (around £30 million) in punitive damages, saying the maker of Marlboro cigarettes was to blame for the illness that will take her life.
"I'm feeling numb. It was a great jury and it took a brave jury to make this decision," the plaintiff, Ms Patricia Henley (53), said after the San Francisco jury more than tripled the $15 million she had requested.
Lawyers for the number one US tobacco company immediately said they would appeal the decision, which legal analysts say could open the way for a raft of new lawsuits against tobacco companies by individual smokers.
"It's obviously a verdict that is out of line with what almost every other jury has done with a case like this," lawyer Mr William Ohlemeyer told reporters. "These are very powerful emotional cases for people. Sometimes juries unfortunately let their emotions or feelings of sympathy get in the way of some of the facts." The huge punitive damage award followed the jury's decision on Tuesday to give Ms Henley $1.5 million in compensatory damages for the pain, suffering and medical costs she has incurred since being diagnosed with fatal lung cancer and quitting smoking in 1997.
A smoker since she was 15, who smoked as many as three packets a day, Ms Henley argued that she had become addicted to cigarettes long before tobacco companies began warning consumers about the health dangers of their products.
"By the time she really had an understanding of what was going on it was many years down the line and she was addicted," Ms Henley's lead lawyer, Ms Madelyn Chaber, said.
The jury foreman, Mr George Loudis, a 47-year-old non-smoker, said the jury was unanimous in feeling that Philip Morris should pay punitive damages, and that anger at the tobacco industry helped to drive the award so high.
"This jury really as a whole was very angry at the cigarette companies," Mr Loudis said.
Industry analysts and legal experts have been closely watching Ms Henley's case as an indicator of what might be in store for tobacco companies, who still face class action and individual suits despite reaching a $206 billion legal settlement with US states last November.
California shelved dozens of lawsuits by smokers in the 1980s, banning such cases on the grounds that the public knew the risks associated with smoking. But the state legislature repealed the ban in 1997, opening the door for Ms Henley's case.
News of Tuesday's $1.5 million compensatory award - which also topped the $975,000 Henley had asked for - sent Philip Morris stock tumbling some 11.5 per cent on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. Stock analysts said more losses could be in the offing when the market opened yesterday. Ms Chaber said she was prepared for an appeal by the tobacco company and hoped that her client would see at least some of the award money before her death, which doctors say could come within the year. But she added that, no matter what happens, both she and her client were heartened and encouraged by the jury's decision.
Anti-smoking campaigners in Britain yesterday welcomed the award as "a great result" which will give hope to lung cancer sufferers.
The ruling comes just days after a court setback in Britain for lung cancer victims seeking compensation from tobacco companies. A judge decided not to exercise his power to allow eight test cases, lodged outside the legal time limit, to proceed against Gallaher and Imperial Tobacco.
Yesterday, Mr Clive Bates, director of the anti-smoking group Ash, said: "There couldn't be a greater contrast with the situation here, where no court has really been able to pore over the entrails of the tobacco companies, and where a judge is applying these unreasonable conditions."
The director general of the UK Cancer Research Campaign, Prof Gordon McVie, said: "This is another nail in the coffin for the tobacco industry. But the danger is, the more we hound them in this country and the US, the more likely they are to target their activities in the Third World. "We got it wrong over here, because we were not tough on them 30 years ago. We must now try to make sure the Third World learns from our mistakes.
"I hope it will give lawyers for cancer patients in this country ammunition to appeal against the judge's decision here."