Jump to full article: San Francisco Chronicle, 2007-05-11
Author: Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Intro: A San Francisco jury has awarded $2.75 million in damages to the family of a woman who died of lung cancer after smoking cigarettes for 26 years, an award less than one-seventh the amount of a previous verdict that was overturned on appeal.
The Superior Court jury decided Wednesday that R.J. Reynolds should pay $250,000 in punitive damages to the estate of Leslie Whiteley, who died in 2000 at age 40. Last week the same jury awarded about $2.5 million against Reynolds and Philip Morris as compensation for financial losses and emotional distress suffered by Whiteley and her family. . . .
But a state appeals court overturned the verdict in 2004 and ordered a new trial. The court cited a 2002 California Supreme Court ruling saying tobacco companies were not responsible for any harm caused by their conduct from 1988 to 1998, while a state law was in effect protecting the firms from suits by individual smokers.
The appeals court said the jury's verdict could have been affected by evidence from that 10-year period, because Whiteley's lawyers had argued during the trial that the companies continued to misrepresent the dangers of smoking throughout the period.
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