Legal Issue
Whether a state court has inherent authority over its own procedural rules.
Overview
Mayola Williams, widow of a long-time Oregon smoker named Jesse Williams, who died of lung cancer, sued Philip Morris USA for fraud based on advertisements and sponsored studies that made cigarettes appear to be less dangerous than they were. In 1999, a jury awarded Mayola Williams compensatory damages of $821,000 and $79.5 million in punitive damages for Philip Morris’ conduct. The trial court found the compensatory damages exceeded the state cap and reduced them to $521,485.50, and found the punitive damages “grossly excessive” and reduced them to $32 million. The Oregon Court of Appeals reversed and reinstated the $79.5 million judgment, after examining the reprehensibility of Philip Morris’ actions, the length of its misinformation campaign and the number of people it had reached. The Oregon Supreme Court denied review. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated the Court of Appeals’ judgment and remanded the case to the Court of Appeals for that court to reconsider the amount of the punitive damages award. Again, the Court of Appeals reinstated the $79.5 million judgment, and this time the Supreme Court of Oregon affirmed, likening the conduct of the defendants to “extraordinarily reprehensible” behavior comparable to manslaughter under Oregon law.
Philip Morris petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court again and the Court struck down the punitive damages award, ruling that the jury may have improperly punished Philip Morris for harm it inflicted on smokers who were not parties to the litigation. The Court held that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment bars punitive damages for harm caused to individuals not involved in the litigation. It ordered the Oregon Supreme Court to reconsider the award and to make sure that, in calculating the punitive damages, jurors had not considered harm to any smokers other than the parties involved in the suit. The Court did not discuss the amount awarded in punitive damages, explaining that the amount might change once the Oregon Supreme Court reevaluated it.
On remand, the Oregon Supreme Court sustained the $79.5 million award on different grounds, ruling that there were independent state law reasons for reaffirming the award since Philip Morris had failed to raise timely objections to the trial judge’s ruling on its suggested jury instructions. Philip Morris promptly petitioned the Supreme Court again, claiming that the state court had not raised this point in the previous proceedings and was attempting to evade the Supreme Court’s instructions. On June 9, 2008, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case for an extraordinary third time.
On September 15, 2006, the Tobacco Control Legal Consortium and our affiliate legal center, the Tobacco Control Resource Center, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the widow, the jury and the Oregon courts. We argued that justice requires higher punitive damages against companies that use “scorched earth” tactics as a way of ensuring that few of their victims ever have a day in court, and a high ratio of punitive to compensatory damages is justified in this case.
On October 9, 2008, the Tobacco Control Legal Consortium, its Massachusetts affiliate, the Tobacco Control Resource Center, and several other parties, filed a second amicus brief, arguing that Philip Morris is not a victim in need of the court’s protection. “Petitioner is no litigation novice, humbly begging a second chance after its first brush with an unfamiliar system has gone awry. Petitioner has an active legal history of exploiting litigation cost and delay as a bludgeon to punish and deter plaintiffs in smokers’ actions like this one.”
Outcome
On April 1, 2009, after initially agreeing to hear Philip Morris’ appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order, stating that the Court’s acceptance of the Philip Morris appeal was “improvidently granted." The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal meant that the Court let stand one of history’s largest awards for punitive damages involving an individual plaintiff against the tobacco industry. By this time, the original 1999 jury award of $79.5 million had risen to approximately $145 million with interest. The large punitive damages award in the nine-year Williams case is significant because it resulted from a ruling that allowed tobacco companies to be held responsible not only for their fraudulent advertising but also for their reprehensible misconduct.