Karbinwynk Suit News on the Web
Archive, October, 1997
Note: These articles wink in and out of existence with the frequency of sub-atomic particles. Many links will be dead. In that case, these pages can be approached as bibliographies, both noting the event, and showing where you might look for further information.
- Jury selection in the latest trial -- the third individual liability case from the hundreds Wilner has filed on behalf of smokers in Florida -- begins Monday in Duval County Court in Jacksonville, with opening statements expected to begin on Wednesday. Testimony in the trial is expected to run for three weeks or more. Joann Karbinwynk, 58, smoked from her teens into her 40s, before stopping 11 years ago when she took up long-distance running. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1995, an ailment Wilner blames on Winston and other Reynolds cigarettes.
- "I can't recall a single case of single-cell lung cancer that did not occur in either a smoker or an ex-smoker," Dr. Victor Roggli, a Duke University pathologist, said, referring to the lung cancer suffered by plaintiff Joann Karbiwynk.
- "No one is suggesting that Reynolds is totally responsible. She admits that she bears responsibility. The question is whether Reynolds bears any responsibility. That's what this trial is about," attorney Norwood "Woody" Wilner said. "This case is to determine whether the manufacturer also has a duty, a burden," he added.
- Attorneys selected four men and five women, including three alternates, to hear testimony in the trial of Joann Karbiwnyk vs. R.J. Reynolds in the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville.
- RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co., the No. 2 U.S. cigarette maker fighting a sick smoker's lawsuit, Friday called as its leadoff witness a historian who said smoking's dangers have been known for a a century. Historian Lacy Ford described to a Florida trial jury decades of U.S. newspaper and other mass media coverage on the dangers of smoking and the well-known anti-tobacco policies of revered figures such as automaker Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison. State governments also actively opposed smoking at the dawn of the 20th century, Lacy Ford said. . . Among the states which acted against tobacco was West Virginia, where plaintiff Joann Karbiwnyk was born. West Virgina banned cigarette sales to young people and required anti-smoking lessons be taught in schools, Lacy said.
- Elizabeth Whelan, founder and president of the American Council on Science and Health, testified in a videotape shown to a Florida jury hearing a smoker's lawsuit charging RJ Reynolds Tobacco with making a dangerous and defective product. Whelan's studies of tobacco industry for the last 20 years showed there had been an effort by cigarette makers to stop the flow of health information on smoking and to issue disinformation to counter the rising fears about smoking, she said. "It is far more harmful than any smoker would have knowledge of. It was even more so in the 1950s," Whelan said.
- JoAnn Karbiwnyk started smoking at age 16 on a dare by a high-school classmate in the 1950s. She said she didn't have a clue about the dangers of her habit. "I wish I had known. I would have probably cut out the cigarettes then," Karbiwnyk testified yesterday in her lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. The woman from Orange Park, Fla., smoked for 30 years before quitting in 1984. She contracted terminal lung cancer in 1995 and sued Reynolds. She alleges that the company produced a defective product that caused her disease.
- A Florida jury deliberated for more than five hours Thursday without reaching a verdict in a product liability lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co, a unit of RJR Nabisco Holding Corp (RN). The jury of two men and four women was scheduled to resume deliberations about 8:30 a.m. EST Friday.
- "These are cases they are pursuing through the normal course of litigation. We point to the national resolution repeatedly as the best way to address all of the issues raised in these cases in an immediate and substantive fashion." . . . "The attorneys pursuing cases against the tobacco industry have asked jurors to ignore society's decision to allow individuals -- knowing all the risks associated with cigarettes -- to make their own choice about smoking," said Daniel W. Donahue, senior vice president for Reynolds.
- "As Washington hears that the industry won at trial, it should reduce the price of the deal," said Gary Black, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "The fact that the industry keeps winning in court ensures that there's going to be a deal."
- The six-member panel also found that the cigarette firm's Winston and Salem Lights cigarettes were not unreasonably dangerous and defective. Reynolds is a unit of RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. (RN).
- Ted Grossman, Reynolds' attorney in the case filed by Jean Karbiwnyk, 59, told reporters the outcome was "particularly satisfying because it came after the admission of documents that I think most courts would not have allowed." . . "If R.J. Reynolds thinks this is the end of it, they have another thing coming," he said. Wilner said he has hundreds of cigarette lawsuits either filed or waiting to be filed in Florida. "We knew this was going to be a long and bloody contest and we're ready to go on from here," he said.
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