15 years after death, man's case being tried
Jump to full article: Houston (TX) Chronicle, 2001-02-06
Author: RICHARD STEWART
Intro: But if there was one thing Grinnell could not quit, it was smoking Pall Mall cigarettes.
That compulsion is at the center of the lawsuit he filed against the American Tobacco Co. before his death from lung cancer in 1986.
His family is pursuing his complaint, and the case finally made it to trial Monday in state District Judge Donald Floyd's courtroom.
In opening statements, Grinnell's lawyers characterized American Tobacco as a greedy company that refused to warn smokers of the dangers of addiction, even though it knew the cigarettes it made were deadly.
"If you become addicted to cigarettes, you have a 2,000 percent greater chance of getting cancer than nonsmokers," attorney Denman Heard said in his opening statement.
Before he died, Grinnell said in a deposition that he never would have started smoking if he had known it would be so difficult to quit. Heard said he still had to have cigarettes, even after he was treated for cancer.
"Why didn't they warn of the danger of addiction before Wiley Grinnell was hooked?" Heard asked.
"When a person is addicted to nicotine, the warning needs to be all the clearer," he said.
Lawyers for American Tobacco characterized Grinnell as a person who would rather shoot pool than work and probably wouldn't have heeded a warning about the addictive nature of cigarettes if he had gotten one.
Defense attorney Sam Cruse pointed out that before 1969 tobacco companies were not required to warn smokers of the dangers of cigarettes and that before the late 1980s health officials didn't call cigarettes addictive, only habit-forming.
Jump to full article » |