John Eastman received millions from Philip Morris in November in a historic first for the tobacco giant.
Jump to full article: St. Petersburg (FL) Times, 2005-01-15
Author: WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE, Times Staff Writer
Intro: John Eastman doesn't feel victorious. He doesn't feel like a man who took on Big Tobacco in a Pinellas County courtroom and won. He's too sick for that.
He can't stop the shaking in his hands. He's always out of breath and tires easily from chronic emphysema. The oxygen tank attached to his electric wheelchair keeps him alive.
Eastman, 76, a lifelong smoker who sued two tobacco companies and won a verdict in 2003, lived to collect more than $3.2-million after attorney's fees.
When someone visited him last week to collect a debt, his hands shook too badly to write a check.
"I'm sick, and I'm never going to get better," Eastman says. "What they paid, it's a drop in the bucket. I don't enjoy looking like this. They should have paid millions and millions so people could see their evil. They weren't punished enough for it."
Two years after a jury awarded him $3.26-million, saying Philip Morris USA and the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. were partially responsible for addicting him to the cigarettes that ruined his health, Eastman has finally collected much of his money.
With appeals exhausted, the tobacco companies paid $4.5-million (they also were assessed Eastman's attorney's fees) in November, the largest single judgment ever paid by Big Tobacco in an individual smoker's case through decades of litigation and hundreds of cases. . . .
And it's the first time that Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette maker, has ever been forced to pay a judgment in an individual case.
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