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• Philip Morris' Legal Smoke Screen 

In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Philip Morris, America's largest cigarette company, compared itself to the NAACP. And to a South Carolina death row inmate illegally denied due process. And to indigent criminal defendants not afforded adequate legal representation. And it did so to win a case against an elderly African American woman named Mayola Williams whose husband died from lung cancer in 1997, after smoking three packs of Marlboros a day for more than 40 years.

The tobacco company has declared itself a civil rights victim, says Ray Thomas, one of Williams' lawyers. "That they have the gall to do that shows how brazen they are," he says. . . .

To give Philip Morris a victory, the high court would have to find some way to square such a decision with its general approach to criminal cases--which is not an easy act of jurisprudence. Indeed, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's new swing voter, wrote a dissent in Kemna, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in which he bashed the majority for disrespecting state courts and for not allowing the Missouri Court of Appeals to enforce its own rules.

Unfortunately, perhaps, for Williams, Kennedy seemed to have forgotten that case on Wednesday. His comments during oral arguments suggest that he was mighty upset that the Oregon Supreme Court had defied a direct order from the high court, however cleverly it might have done it. . . .

Breyer's conversion had Robert Peck, the lawyer who argued the case for Williams, beaming after the arguments. Peck had gone into court as the underdog. The day before the arguments, Thomas, his cocounsel, had despaired that the court had not taken up the case "to do any good for Mayola Williams," who is now in her late '70s and who will be lucky to live long enough to see the decade-long litigation resolved in her favor. Yet after hearing Breyer's questions, Peck remarked after the hearing, "This is not necessarily the case [the justices] thought it was." Indeed, it's not such a stretch to believe that the court just might find that Oregon is not Alabama, and Philip Morris is not the NAACP.

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