Court hears Big Tobacco case
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court heard a tobacco company’s plea for relief from a $79.5 million punitive damages award Tuesday, in a case that could illuminate the Roberts court’s approach to tort reform.
In recent years, the court has helped the business community on the punitive-damages issue, ruling that excessive awards violate companies’ constitutional rights. But Tuesday’s case may be especially significant because the firm seeking help is tobacco company Philip Morris, and it has been found liable not for bilking a consumer out of money, but for actually killing him.
A ruling in Philip Morris’ favor would suggest that the court is so concerned about high punitive damages that it would protect even an unpopular corporate defendant. For their part, consumer and anti-smoking groups hope that a court will rule against Philip Morris – and show that punitive-damage limits do not apply to especially reprehensible conduct.
By the end of oral arguments Tuesday, however, it seemed that the court was reluctant to rule broadly in either direction.
Instead, several members of the court, including some who had supported its recent limits on punitive damages, suggested that the best way to handle the case would be to send it back to the Oregon Supreme Court for clarification of technical state law issues.
“What’s worrying me about this case is … that we’re going to be in a kind of bog of mixtures of constitutional law, unclear Oregon state law, not certain exactly what was meant by whom in the context of the trial, et cetera,” said Justice Stephen Breyer, who voted in favor of the court’s previous decisions limiting punitive damages.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented from those decisions, made similar points, as did Justice David Souter.
Tuesday’s case, Philip Morris v. Williams, began with a lawsuit in Oregon by Mayola Williams, the widow of Jesse Williams, a lifelong Marlboro smoker who died of lung cancer in 1997.
She alleged that the company had knowingly lied when it minimized the health risks of smoking in public statements beginning in the 1950s and stretching over four decades thereafter. Jesse Williams repeatedly referred to those statements in explaining his refusal to quit smoking.
In 1999, an Oregon jury found Philip Morris liable for fraud. It awarded Mayola Williams $821,000 in compensation, and assessed the company $79.5 million in punitive damages – a ratio of punitive to compensatory damages of 97-to-1.
The Oregon Supreme Court has upheld the award, even after the Supreme Court asked it to reconsider in light of its ruling outlining a maximum punitive-compensatory ratio of 9 to 1.
Philip Morris alleges that the trial judge violated the Constitution when he refused Philip Morris’ request to bar the jury from punishing the company for harm it caused other smokers than Jesse Williams.
The jury instruction Philip Morris had proposed would have told jurors that they could “consider” the impact of the company’s conduct on other smokers but not punish it. Several justices thought the instruction was so unclear that it would not have necessarily helped Philip Morris anyway.