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Jury Sides With Brown & Williamson In Lawsuit Involving Smoker's Death 

Other analysts were more tempered. "I would say I'm still neutral on the sector," said David Adelman, at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "I would say recent trends in individual litigation are that the industry's problems may be in pockets in the country, as opposed to pervasive." . . Proving that cigarettes are defectively designed, however, requires showing that Brown & Williamson could have made a safer cigarette and that Mr. Steele would have smoked the brand, both difficult burdens of proof. And since youth marketing wasn't an issue in the case given Mr. Steele's age when he switched to Kools, the trial lacked evidence successfully presented elsewhere that Brown & Williamson targeted underage youths as future smokers.

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