Tobacco.org

• Tobacco verdict is upheld on appeal 

A North Little Rock man who lost his wife of 49 years to lung cancer celebrated a victory Friday after hearing that a federal appellate court upheld a jury verdict that a cigarette company was to blame. "Obviously, I’m in pretty good shape for a rainy day," said Henry Boerner, 74, whose first wife, Mary Jane, died at age 69 in 1999. . . .

A three-judge panel of the 8 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis upheld a May 2003 verdict by a federal jury in Little Rock that heard the Boerners’ lawsuit against Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.

In the first trial in Arkansas pitting an individual plaintiff against a tobacco company, jurors awarded Mary Jane Boerner’s survivors $4,025,000 in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages. Jurors found that the cigarette company’s predecessor, American Tobacco Co., defectively designed Pall Malls and failed to warn smokers about the dan- gers of cigarettes before 1969, when the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act went into effect.

While upholding the verdict, the 8 th Circuit panel reduced the punitive-damages award to $5 million. That reduced the total award to $9,025,000 from $19,025,000.

But Boerner didn’t complain

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[T]he evidence indicates that American Tobacco manufactured, marketed and sold Pall Mall cigarettes containing excessively high levels of carcinogenic tar and lacking effective filter technology, for and in the state of Arkansas; untruthfully represented that cigarette smoking did not cause cancer; and actively attempted to suppress research into the harmful health consequences of cigarette smoking.
8 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the Boerner case.