A jury finds Big Tobacco partly liable in a suit by a radio host who smoked four packs a day.
Jump to full article: St. Petersburg (FL) Times, 2003-04-04
Author: WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE, Times Staff Writer
Intro: John Eastman started smoking when he was 12. It was the 1940s, and smoking was as American as baseball. Cigarette ads dominated the radio, and the boy who wanted a career on the airwaves couldn't miss them.
As an adult, Eastman smoked four packs a day. He failed at every effort to quit.
"I was addicted," said Eastman, 74, a former radio personality once known as Tampa Bay's dean of talk radio. "The cigarette companies were handing me a deadly instrument and they weren't telling me."
On Thursday, a Pinellas County jury agreed. After a four-week trial and two days of deliberations, the jurors handed Eastman $3.26-million in damages for the cigarettes he says caused his emphysema and an aortic aneurysm.
The verdict against Philip Morris USA and the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., which made the cigarettes Eastman smoked until he quit in 1995, is the largest-ever tobacco award in the Tampa Bay area.
"I'm very grateful for the jury's decision," Eastman said afterward, sitting in an electric scooter that carries him and his oxygen around. "If there's anything just in society, I'll live to see them pay."
Both companies say they plan to appeal the verdict.
Jump to full article » |