THE US Supreme Court has dealt a blow to Philip Morris, saying it would not decide the cigarette-maker’s challenge of a punitive damages award brought by the widow of a longtime smoker that now is worth nearly $150 million (€113 million).
The court’s decision on Tuesday, announced in a one-sentence order, was a surprising and anticlimactic ending to a case that has bounded back and forth through the judicial system for nearly a decade.
When an Oregon jury awarded Mayola Williams nearly $80 million following the death of her husband, Jesse, it was the largest award of its kind.
Even though the justices have strongly implied that the award was too large and twice sent the case back west, the Oregon Supreme Court found reasons to leave it as it was.
After the Oregon justices declined to change its decision for a second time, lawyers for the Philip Morris company petitioned the Supreme Court to “vindicate” its authority.
Instead, the court on Tuesday said it should not have accepted the case for a third time, and in the language of the court, dismissed the case as “improvidently granted”.
When it last considered the case, the court ruled five to four that the Oregon court had applied the wrong constitutional standard in reviewing the award.
It strongly suggested that the figure was too high and told the state court to make sure the jury had not awarded such heavy punitive damages because of harm the cigarette maker may have done to others, rather than to Williams.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in the case, said he thought at first that Oregon was giving the court the “runaround”. But after studying the case more closely, he said: “I’m not sure that I think that now.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts jnr had suggested during the arguments that the court use the case to finally decide the question of whether there should be a cap on punitive damages.
The justices had declined to accept that issue when they took Philip Morris’s petition, and doing so would likely have required additional briefing and more arguments.
It would have greatly raised the stakes of the case, and settled a question that big business and trial lawyers have battled over for years.
The issue of whether large punitive damages awards are unconstitutional is one that has split the court in a way different from its ideological divide.
Because of interest that the company must pay, it is unclear exactly what the award is currently worth, but it was set at $143 million last June.
Under Oregon law, it is to be split between the state and Mayola Williams. –( LA Times-Washington Postservice)