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• Tobacco, Asbestos Trust Lawyers Argue Over Smoking Liability 

Brown & Williamson Tobacco attorney David Bernick countered that the British American Tobacco Plc unit and other companies should not pay damages to the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, set up to pay off health claims brought by former asbestos workers. The cigarette makers never defrauded workers who filed claims for smoking-related illnesses, he said.

Trust fund attorney Edward Westbrook urged jurors to pin responsibility on the companies for conspiring to lie to the public. He told jurors to ignore the industry's claims that it has reformed.

``You're going to have to get past an industry that admitted they were lying for decades to sell more cigarettes,'' Westbrook said in closing argument in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

Westbrook claimed a smoker is 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than the average person, an asbestos worker is five times more likely, and the two factors together increase the risk by 50 times through a process known as ``synergy.''

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