R.J. Reynolds Ordered to Pay Smoker $15 Million

A federal judge in Kansas City, Kan., issued a scathing ruling Friday against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc., ordering the cigarette maker to pay $15 million in punitive damages to a former smoker who lost his legs to a circulatory disease.

Amid a string of courtroom losses for the tobacco industry, the ruling by U.S. District Judge John W. Lungstrum in some ways was more of the same. But the award to former Camel smoker David Burton, 67, was the first punitive damage award against a tobacco firm in federal court, where stricter rules of evidence generally favor the defense. And Lungstrum was savage in describing Reynolds’ conduct, using such words as “nefarious” and “insidious” to describe it.

“It is not for making a dangerous product that [Reynolds] should be punished,” Lungstrum said in his ruling. “It is for concealing how dangerous the product is that R.J. Reynolds merits punishment.... The fact that Reynolds concealed the addictive nature of tobacco is particularly nefarious.”

Executives with Reynolds, the second-leading U.S. cigarette maker behind Philip Morris Co., called the award “excessive and unwarranted” and said they would appeal. “As we showed during the trial, Reynolds Tobacco had no information about smoking and health that wasn’t publicly known during the entire time that ... Mr. David Burton smoked,” said Daniel W. Donahue, senior vice president and deputy general counsel.

In February, Burton, a former janitor and railroad worker who suffers from peripheral vascular disease, was awarded $196,416 in compensatory damages by a federal jury, which further ruled that Reynolds should pay punitive damages in an amount Lungstrum would determine.

He heard arguments last month on punitive damages, leading to his Friday ruling.

Before the verdict in February, cigarette makers had never lost a case in America’s conservative Midwestern heartland, had never lost a case in federal court and had never been found liable in a case involving circulatory disease.

Tobacco companies are appealing six other pending punitive damage awards in California, Oregon or Florida. Some analysts have suggested that the industry’s legal problems are confined to these areas of the country.

Friday’s ruling “underscores the reality that, regarding tobacco litigation, the major tobacco companies are not facing a ‘West Coast’ problem; they face a reprehensibility problem,” said Edward L. Sweda Jr., a senior attorney with the Tobacco Products Liability Project, an anti-smoking group in Boston.

Reynolds executives, noting that the punitive award was about 75 times as great as Burton’s compensatory damages, said the decision ran afoul of suggestions by the U.S. Supreme Court that such damages be in reasonable proportion.

Earlier this week, tobacco companies suffered their first defeat in a secondhand smoke case when a Miami jury awarded $5.5 million to Lynn French, 56, a flight attendant who was found to have developed chronic sinus problems from breathing the air in smoky airline cabins. She is one of nearly 3,000 flight attendants bringing individual claims against the industry under terms of a 1997 class-action settlement.