Jump to full article: Boston (MA) Herald, 1999-08-06
Author: Andrea Estes
Intro: U.S. District Court Judge George O'Toole dismissed nearly every claim brought by the Massachusetts Laborers' Health & Welfare Fund, a union plan that says it has paid out millions of dollars for smoking related illnesses.
It is the first time O'Toole, who is overseeing more than 35 individual tobacco suits, has ruled on key arguments underlying all the cases. . . Since the 1950s, there has been ``well publicized'' evidence and warnings about the effects of cigarette smoking on health, wrote O'Toole. Smokers or other plaintiffs could have weighed the conflicting information and decided not to smoke, the ruling suggests.
``The complaint offers no basis for concluding that it was reasonable for the plaintiff to rely on the defendants' information as opposed to the contradictory information from other sources also in the public domain . . . the deficiency is fatal,'' wrote O'Toole.
Jump to full article »
Quotes from this article:
The complaint offers no basis for concluding that it was reasonable for the plaintiff to rely on the defendants' information as opposed to the
contradictory information from other sources also in the public domain.
Information War strategy is addressed by U.S. District Court Judge George O'Toole in his ruling which dismissed nearly every claim brought by the Massachusetts Laborers' Health & Welfare Fund. Quoted in <i>Judge blows off smoking suit claim</i>
|