Tobacco.org

US Supreme Court denies certiorari for Engle litigation ($$) 

In between hours of oral argument over the federal health care legislation, the justices took the time to deny certiorari in the first of the Florida tobacco suits to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Florida’s individual tobacco suits, known as the Engle litigation, involve separate trials held to determine if a plaintiff was addicted to cigarettes ... . . .

Steve Callahan, a spokesperson for Philip Morris, agreed.

“The failure to grant review is not a decision on the merits of the case,” he said in a statement. “We continue to believe that we have strong due process challenges to the litigation and will continue to raise those challenges in Florida state and federal courts. ”

But Edward L. Sweda, Jr., a senior attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, said he was “ecstatic” about the justices’ decision to pass on the cases.

“At long last, Reynolds and the other major tobacco companies will be held accountable for their massive and reprehensible misconduct that harmed thousands of Florida smokers,” Sweda said in a statement.

Jump to full article »

Tobacco Companies Get Smoked in Court  

• State Supreme Court Sides With Harrison Health Board On Smoking  

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals decided Friday that Harrison County Circuit Judge Thomas Bedell was correct in Jan. 2011 when he dismissed a lawsuit over the county's clean indoor air act.

The suit was filed by the Harrison County Fraternal and Service Association against the Harrison-Clarksburg Board of Health.

The association felt that it should be exempt from the county's smoking ban, because it held charitable raffles at its facilities.

Jump to full article »

High court lets stand $17.5M local verdict against tobacco company  

The last legal avenue has likely closed for Big Tobacco to avoid paying an Alachua County jury's 2010 award of $17.5 million to a widow whose husband died from lung cancer after 38 years of smoking.

Without comment, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned down a request for an appeal in the case involving Arthur Lamar Hall, who died at age 57 in 1995. His widow, Amanda Jean Hall had sued RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and in 2010 was awarded what was then the biggest single civil verdict in this county.

Jump to full article »

Supreme Court OKs Stacked Anti-Tobacco Suits, But Pioneering Heroes Ignored 

The real heroes, the two attorneys who first opened the doors and made all this possible, are the husband-and-wife law firm of Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, says Banzhaf, noting that they were hailed at a recent World Conference on Nonsmokers' Rights in Washington as the "King and Queen of Torts."

"I worked with the self-proclaimed King of Torts, Melvin Belli, at a time when he was trying to put the final jewel in his crown by successfully suing a tobacco company on behalf of a smoker. He never made it before he died," recounted Banzhaf.

Jump to full article »

VIDEO: Pensacola Tobacco case 

High court won't hear Reynolds cases 

"Today was a horrible day for Reynolds," said Ed Sweda, a senior lawyer for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University School of Law.

"The big problem for Reynolds and the other defendants is that they will now have to start cutting big checks and no longer have the due-process argument to attack the many plaintiff verdicts that have occurred over the past three years."

After the Florida Supreme Court declined to accept Reynolds' appeal of the four verdicts, the company filed petitions for writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 16. Its goal was clarity on the company's — and the industry's — financial exposure to the Engle cases.

Jeff Raborn, assistant general counsel for Reynolds, said the U.S. Supreme Court's decision "does not represent a ruling on the merits of Reynolds' constitutional argument."

Jump to full article »

$50M Worth Of Tobacco Appeals Won't Get High Court Hearing ($$) 

Supreme Court Won't Hear Tobacco Case 

However, the judge noted, "We disagree with [the company's] characterization of the Engle findings."

The judge concluded that the findings in the Engle case "established the conduct elements of Mrs. Martin's strict liability, fraudulent concealment, civil conspiracy, and negligence claims against RJR" and that "Mrs. Martin produced sufficient independent evidence to prove causation, detrimental reliance, and entitlement to punitive damages. The punitive damage award ... satisfies due process in view of the evidence of decades-long wanton conduct by RJR and because the award does not financially devastate the company."

Jump to full article »

• Supreme Court Rejects Key Tobacco Industry Appeal Leaving “Massive Liability . . . with no End in Sight.” 

Edward L. Sweda, Jr., Senior Attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project (a project of the Public Health Advocacy Institute based at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston) was ecstatic to learn of the denial of Reynolds’ cert petition. “At long last, Reynolds and the other major tobacco companies will be held accountable for their massive and reprehensible misconduct that harmed thousands of Florida smokers. As Reynolds’ own lawyers have concluded, denial of its cert petition is a very big deal indeed,” Sweda said.

Jump to full article »

• R.J. Reynolds Loses Bid to Fight Smoker’s Verdict in High Court  

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t review a $28.3 million wrongful death verdict against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., declining to consider legal questions that may affect thousands of similar cases by smokers and their families.

The court today left intact the verdict in a case filed in the wake of a 2006 Florida Supreme Court decision that lets plaintiffs in cigarette-liability suits use factual findings by a jury in an earlier case to prove their claims. Reynolds, Altria Group Inc. and other U.S. cigarette makers claim Florida trial judges are applying the findings too broadly, depriving them of their right to defend themselves in court.

“The Florida state courts are engaged in serial due- process violations that threaten the defendants with literally billions of dollars of liability,” Reynolds said in a brief seeking review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jump to full article »

Supreme court refuses tobacco firm appeal in smoker case 

The Supreme Court said on Monday it will not hear an appeal by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co in a Florida case in which it was ordered to pay $28.3 million to a woman whose husband died of lung cancer after decades of smoking its cigarettes.

The justices refused an appeal by the Reynolds American Inc unit, which argued that its constitutional due process rights had been violated and that the issue could affect thousands of pending cases in Florida against tobacco companies.

In 2009, a state trial court in Pensacola, Florida, ordered Reynolds to pay more than $3.3 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages to Mathilde Martin.

Jump to full article »

HEIST: WHO STOLE THE AMERICAN DREAM? (PDF) 

Beginning with background on the New Deal, Heist explores how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s progressive policies were derailed by Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidential administrations, benefiting only the wealthiest investors and CEOs. Heist exposes the full story: how corporate leaders worked with elected officials of both major political parties to create the largest transfer of wealth in history, looting the economy to create a gap between rich and poor previously seen only in impoverished colonial nations. The film is structured as a political thriller, showing the shift from FDR’s New Deal reforms to an ideology where the free market reigns. It reveals the impact of the infamous Powell memo of 1971 entitled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," which was a call to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for American business to defend its interests against criticisms of unregulated capitalism. The Powell Memo and the 1000 page Mandate for Leadership document published in 1980 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which were written to promote business interests and deregulation, serve as the starting points of the story to show the roots of the class warfare unleashed by big business, and how wealth in the U.S. was transferred from workers to corporate interests over decades of policy shifts.

Heist also reveals how corporate right-wingers such as Joseph Coors founded conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, that provided intellectual justifications for redistributing wealth upward.

Jump to full article »

• The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto)  

Introduction

In 1971, Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell's nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell's legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell "might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice...in behalf of business interests."

Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy. . . .

So did Powell's political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment "right" for corporations to influence ballot questions. On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers. . . .

But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

Moreover, there is the quite understandable reluctance on the part of any one corporation to get too far out in front and to make itself too visible a target.

The role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital. . . .

If the authors, publishers and users of textbooks know that they will be subjected -- honestly, fairly and thoroughly -- to review and critique by eminent scholars who believe in the American system, a return to a more rational balance can be expected.

Jump to full article »

Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?  

A new, groundbreaking feature documentary about the roots of the American economic crisis, and the continuing assault on working and middle class people in the United States. "Heist" boldly reveals the crumbling structure of the U.S. economy - the result of four decades of deregulation, massive job outsourcing, and tax policies favoring mega-corporations and wealthy elites.

Through expert testimony, investigative filmmaking and key archival footage, "Heist" unfolds critical historical background, beginning with the dismantling of FDR's New Deal, uncovering the ideological influence of the infamous Powell Memo and the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership on government reform, and traces both Republican and Democratic allegiance to big business.

Jump to full article »