Court to decide if $15 million award to ex-smoker is correct
Jump to full article: Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), 2004-01-13
Author: Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
Intro: After David Burton's decades of smoking required his legs to be amputated in 1993, a Kansas jury awarded him $200,000 for medical costs and lost income and a judge ordered the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to pay him $15 million in punitive damages.
The 69-year-old former janitor never collected the millions, which are now the subject of a dispute before the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that could affect the size of punitive damages in federal courts nationwide. . . .
The $15 million in punitive damages ordered by a Kansas judge in 2002 is 75 times Burton's compensatory damages. The tobacco company's lawyers contend that violates a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that punitive damages shouldn't be vastly more than compensatory damages.
But the nation's high court didn't say how much more punitive damages could be. The ruling, however, suggested that "single digit" ratios - punitive damages less than 10 times the compensatory damages - might be more acceptable.
Three 10th Circuit judges heard oral arguments on the issue Monday in Denver.
Jump to full article » |