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Tobacco smoke hangs heavy in local bars. Both St. Helens and Scappoose have busy tobacco stores.
Tobacco use is still in fashion in Colombia County, according to a study by the Oregon Department of Human Services.
Twenty-six percent of adults use tobacco, the study says. That’s five percentage points higher than the rest of the state. Twice as many pregnant women use tobacco. Ten percent of 8th-graders admit to using tobacco and 21 percent of 11th-graders say they’ve used tobacco in last 30 days.
The Centers for Disease Control estimate tobacco use cost $30 million in Columbia County. . . .
The sad news is tobacco, poor diets and physical inactivity are impairing and killing Oregonians.
Twenty-two percent of all Oregon deaths are linked to tobacco.
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Issue: Whether the Supreme Court of Oregon, on remand from the Court’s 2007 decision on the constitutionality of a $79.5 million punitive damages award based on harms done to non-named plaintiffs, improperly asserted a state law procedural bar having the effect of precluding Phillip Morris from asserting a constitutional claim. . . .
* Amicus brief of the Chamber of Commerce (in support of the petitioner)
* Amicus brief of the Washington Legal Foundation and Allied Educational Foundation (in support of the petitioner)
* Amicus brief of Associated Oregon Industries, et al. (in support of the petitioner)
* Amicus brief of the Product Liability Advisory Council, Inc. (in support of the petitioner)
Ann Way, Lincoln County Health & Human Services Chronic Care Program Coordinator and Tobacco Prevention Education Program Coordinator, has begun communications with Oregon Coast Community College (OCCC) Board of Education regarding the dangers of tobacco use, second-hand smoke, and an institution's role in preventing exposure.
Way presented board members last month with a packet of information regarding the dangers of tobacco use, quitting methods, prevention methods, and resources.
Her project through an 18-month grant is to work with educational entities to encourage tobacco-free environments. This month, to further advocate for her cause, she attended the board meeting with two guests, Andrew Esptein, school policy coordinator with the American Lung Association of Oregon; and Dr. Keith Harcourt, member of the Tobacco Advisory Council. Their goal is for OCCC campuses to join the tobacco-free educational institution club.
Portland Community College will become first tobacco-free community college in Oregon when it bans tobacco use on all campuses by fall 2009.
"This will be a big change," PCC President Preston Pulliams said. "We must ensure that it is planned, paced and fundamentally respectful of people's rights, regardless of their view of the change."
Currently, the college only allows smoking outdoors in designated smoking areas, away from school buildings.
On January 31ist, the supreme court of Oregon agreed to hear, once again, appeals from Tobacco giant Phillip-Morris. At stake is seventy nine and a half million dollars, the tidy sum in damages awarded to the widow of lifetime smoker Jesse Williams.
At issue is the near impunity with which big Tobacco navigates the murky waters of the American legal system. A 2005 case leveled against amalgamated big tobacco by the US Justice department was crippled by a faction within the Justice department. Sharon Eubanks, the prosecutor in that case told the Washington Post on March 22nd, 2007 that her case, and the justice is represented for the American smoker, was hamstrung by politics. . . .
According to a June 6th Reuters article, roughly ten thousand Florida cases of similar content are waiting in the wings for Williams' widow to get paid. As soon as she does, this will trigger a flood of cases against Tobacco for negligence in reporting the dangers associated with their product. By giving our support to consumer protection alliances, hopefully a dint in the legal bulwark of big industry can be made.
This will only be true if Williams is paid, however. It is up to the Oregon supreme court to use this case to increase private citizens ability to reprimand huge corporations for misbehavior.
T ed Kulongoski knows how to take a punch.
As a young man in the Marines, he was a Golden Gloves amateur boxer. That's why today, as Oregon governor, he understands the need for lawmakers to get up off the mat and keep fighting for his request for a cigarette tax increase to help uninsured kids.
Kulongoski's plan does indeed deserve another shot. Voters defeated it last fall not because they oppose health care for low-income children but because they prefer to enshrine taxes in statutes, not in the state constitution. . . .
Taxing tobacco is fair and wise. Leaving children uninsured is unfair and profoundly unwise.
No Big Tobacco smokescreen can obscure this choice facing the 2009 Legislature.
Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski will have another go at raising the state's cigarette tax in order to extend health coverage to more than 100,000 uninsured children. The Oregonian reported on its editorial pages Saturday that the governor has called on legislators to revive the 84.5 cent-per-pack tax hike voters rejected last fall. This time, however, the tax increase would not be submitted to voters as a constitutional amendment. . . .
The value of a high cigarette tax is realized not so much in the new revenue it produces in the short term as in the lives and health-care dollars saved over the long haul.
most of Oregon's elective bodies, from the Legislature to city councils to local school boards, prohibit smoking in various places for the same reason -- smoking is bad for your health.
Despite this common knowledge, Beaverton resident Patricia Lowe brought a negligence class-action suit against several tobacco companies. She claimed to represent 500,000 Oregonians who still smoke cigarettes and another 75,000 who chew tobacco.
On behalf of the state's tobacco users, she demanded the companies pay for relief in the form of medical monitoring tests, smoking cessation programs and public education.
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Portland Community College is the third Oregon college to forbid smoking and other tobacco uses anywhere on its property.
Oregon Health and Science University and the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine took the step last year.
Andrew Epstein is the college advocate for the American Lung Association of Oregon. He says PCC's size and mission make the ban significant.
Former longtime Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Edwin Peterson said in a telephone interview that the U.S. justices just may use the Oregon case "as a vehicle to more fully develop the law on punitive damages."
He noted for the last 15 to 20 years the laws surrounding punitive damages have been "in an state of uncertainty."
"The Supreme Court of the United States may also be concerned that the Supreme Court of Oregon is not following the law laid out in its earlier decisions," said Peterson, who teaches pre-trial civil litigation at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Ore.
Amicus briefs
* Brief for the Product Liability Advisory Council, Inc., in Support of Petitioner
* Brief for the Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America in Support of Petitioner
* Brief for Former Commissioners and Senior Staff of the Federal Trade Commission in Support of Petitioner
* Brief for the Washington Legal Foundation in Support of Petitioner
* Brief for the National Association of Manufacturers in Support of Reversal
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments for the second time from Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA unit, the country's largest cigarette maker, on a $79.5 million award in an Oregon smoker lawsuit.
The decision to hear the company's appeal averts, at least for now, what would be a record payment in an individual smoker case. The award to a smoker's widow has grown to more than $140 million with interest.
Philip Morris and its corporate allies say lower courts around the country are ignoring Supreme Court rulings putting limits on punitive damages. In the latest case, the justices will decide whether an Oregon court, reconsidering the case on orders from the Supreme Court, improperly relied on a state-law ground in reaffirming the award.
The Oregon court ruling ``is symptomatic of the disregard that some state courts show for precedents of this court that protect the rights of locally unpopular defendants against arbitrary punitive damages awards,'' the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in a court filing.
This Court remanded to the Oregon Supreme Court to permit that court to "apply. the standard we have set forth." ld. Because application of the correct standard "may lead to the need for a new trial, or a change in the level of the punitive damages award," this Court did not "consider whether the award is constitutionally ’grossly excessive."’ Id.
On remand, the Oregon Supreme Court addressed only the trial court’s failure to give an instruction on the issue of harm to nonparties. Williams v. Philip Morris Inc., 344 Or. 45, 176 P.3d 1255 (2008)("Williams H’). It decided that the proposed jury instruction at issue was flawed for reasons "we did not identify in our former opinion," and that for these "other reasons" the trial court did not err in refusing to give that instruction. Id. at 48, 176 P.3d at 1257. With respect to the excessiveness of the award, the Court simply "reaffirm[ed] our prior opinion in all respects."
This Court’s prior ruling could not have been more clear--the due process clause "forbids a State to use a punitive damages award to punish a defendant for injury that it inflicts upon nonparties.., who are, essentially, strangers to the litigation." Philip Morris, 127 S, Ct. at 1063. Moreover, this Court held that the Due Process Clause "requires States to provide assurances that juries are not asking the wrong question," and in the process punishing defendants for harm to those strangers. Id. at 1064. That proposition was presented to this Court by petitioner after being rejected on the merits by not only the Oregon Supreme Court, but also the Oregon Court of Appeals (twice) and the trial court. Instead of faithfully applying this Court’s ruling on remand, however, the Oregon Supreme Court invoked a novel procedural rule--for the first time in nine years of this litigation--to avoid remedying the constitutional infirmities identified by this Court.
It is a fundamental and bedrock principle of American jurisprudence that the United States Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of cases or controversies that come before it.
Respondent asserts, in conclusory fashion, that the futility rule is not satisfied here. Opp. 22. But it plainly would have been futile for Philip Morris to resubmit an instruction that corrected the wording of unrelated proposals. At the charge conference, the parties argued separately the harm-to-others portion of the proposed instruction. Pet. App. 156a-162a. The trial court made a separate and independent ruling with respect to Philip Morris’s request for an instruction on that subject. See id. at 163a (“The Court: So I think I have satisfactorily worked my way through your Element No. 1” of Proposed Instruction No. 34). Accordingly, even if the instruction had not included the “errors” identified by the Oregon Supreme Court on remand, the trial court still would have declined to instruct the jury on punishment for harms to non-parties, because the trial court rejected the instruction on its merits. This is precisely the situation addressed in George.6 . . .
Respondent contends, as she did in 2006, that we have asked the Court to “elevate” the reasonable relationship requirement, which would “contradict this Court’s assignment of primary responsibility” to the reprehensibility guidepost. Opp. 37. But the question presented is not whether the reprehensibility guidepost is more important than the other two. Rather, the question presented is whether a court’s subjective determination of reprehensibility can “override” the requirement that there be a reasonable relationship at all. This Court found that question worthy of review in 2006, and it remains so.