Courts & the Law: Just Deserts or Just Harsh
Congressional Quarterly Weekly
October 20, 2006

Jesse Williams rationalized about the dangers of smoking cigarettes for more than 40 years. In part, he trusted the tobacco companies when they said that the link between smoking and lung cancer had not been proved. But when Williams was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in 1996, he told his wife Mayola, "Those darn cigarette people finally did it. They were lying all the time."
 
In 1999, two years after his death, an Oregon jury ordered the Philip Morris Co. -- the maker of Williams' favorite brand, Marlboro -- to pay Mayola $820,000 in compensatory damages and another $79.7 million in punitive damages. Oregon courts have twice upheld the punitive damage award, satisfied that the jury had reason to find that Philip Morris had perpetrated a fraud on Williams and other smokers in the state and that the company's conduct was both profitable and reprehensible in the extreme.
 
Next week, Philip Morris, the nation's biggest tobacco company, will ask the Supreme Court to throw out the punitive damage award. The company hopes to use the case to persuade the justices to set stricter rules for the federal courts to follow in an area traditionally left to the states.
 
The war over punitive damages has now been raging for more than three decades. Business lobbies and other "tort reform" groups have planted in people's minds the image of an out-of-control civil justice system that frequently imposes outlandish punitive damage awards on companies based mostly on knee-jerk hostility to big corporations.
 
Any number of research reports and academic studies have shown that image to be essentially false. One report in the late 1990s by the Rand Corp. Institute for Civil Justice concluded that punitive damages are seldom sought and even more rarely awarded. A more recent study by University of Georgia professors Susette Talarico and Thomas Eaton found that out of 25,000 state civil lawsuits studied, punitive damages were sought in only about 3,700 cases and awarded in only 15.
 
As Talarico laments, such research gets far less attention from the public than the occasional spectacular case with a multimillion- dollar punitive damage award. "These become the basis for most people's generalizations about the tort system," she says.

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