You may hate tobacco lawsuits and lawyers who bring them. But you cannot help but agree that the tobacco industry is absolutely despicable. How the executives of the industry who lied to the country and the government for years can sleep is beyond me.
There are lots of people who agree, one group of them being the Supreme Court of the State of Oregon. This opinion affirms a significant punitive damage verdict against Phillip Morris.
Some excerpts:
The jury returned a verdict for the defendant today in the retrial of the first federal court Vioxx trial.
A mistrial was declared the first time the case was tried. This time a New Orleans jury went for the defendant.
The lawyer for the plaintiff said that “the biggest problem was Judge Eldon Fallon’s ruling, shortly before the trial, that two of their experts — a cardiologist and a pathologist — could not testify that Vioxx was to blame for Irvin’s heart attack. They were experts in their fields, but not about Vioxx, the judge ruled.”
Are you looking at a rollover case? ATLA has information that will help.
For example, the ATLA link says that “[n]ow public General Motors internal documents show that the auto industry knew as early as 1966 that their roof design was so weak that in rollover accidents it crushed occupants to death. They could have fixed this defect for as little as $43.13.”
There is more information about rollover cases here.
This news article informs us that a jury was seated in the re-trial of the federal court case mis-tried several months ago. The last trial of the case took place in Houston; this trial is in New Orleans. Here is an article about the events of the first day.
How will the actions of the New England Journal of Medicine impact the trial? That issue is dicussed in this article.
There is another trial under way in the Rio Grande Vally – this one is in state court.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has cut a punitive damage award in a products liability case. A jury determined that the defendant produced a defective product that caused the death of the occupant of it. The jury awarded, and the trial judge affirmed, a $3,000,000 punitive damage award.
The appellate court cut the punitive damage award to $471K (200% of the compensatory damage award) and summarized its reasons for doing so as follows: “an application of the Gore guideposts to the facts of this case reveals that (1) Chrysler’s misconduct does not constitute a high degree of reprehensibility, (2) the ratio of punitive to compensatory awards is unjustifiably large, and (3) a wide gap exists between the punitive damage award and comparable civil penalties. The fact of Mr. Clark’s death does not outweigh all.”
Judge Moore dissented, saying “Chrysler’s conduct was reprehensible, the ratio between the punitive and compensatory damages awards was neither breathtaking nor otherwise unreasonable given the circumstances of the case, and the punitive damages award was in line with comparable civil penalties ….”
Here is a good article from the Washington Post that summarizes where we are and what lies ahead in Vioxx litigation.
A Washington state court judge has entered a default judgment against Hyundai for failure to give accurate information concerning past claims.
Read more here.
You would think that I would react differently.
After all, I am 49 years old. I have practiced law for over 24 years. I paid my way to college and law school mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and sacking groceries. I supplemented those earnings with work as a meat cutter, a dishwasher, and a bartender. I actually managed a bar for my two years of college; I hired and tried to keep a staff of some 25 bartenders. I worked as the owner’s representative for a real estate developer on a construction site for one summer, and worked for a mobile home manufacturer for two summers. In those jobs I interacted with people in every walk of life in a wide variety of situations.
I have seen a lot of wonderful things and a lot horrible things in my law practice.
I wrote a post the other day about the efforts by the FDA to limit lawsuits by consumers injured by drugs.
Here is an update.
The Missouri Court of Appeals has reversed a jury verdict entered in favor of a brain damaged woman and her husband. The two argued a 1993 Cutlass had a defective cruise control which caused a wreck that injured the woman.
The appellate court held that the trial judge should not have permitted 139 prior incident into evidence because they were not sufficiently similar to the accident at issue. The court also ruled that punitive damages were not appropriate in the case. (Under Missouri law, “punitive damages are appropriate, therefore, only when the defendant’s conduct is outrageous due to evil motive or reckless indifference to the rights of others, which must be proven by clear and convincing evidence”.)
Importantly, however, the appellate court did hold that the plaintiffs presented “evidence that Mrs. Peter’s accident was not “an operator created incident,” that the cruise control mechanism located on the Peters’ vehicle was defectively designed and dangerous; that a single transient fault actuated the throttle of the vehicle and caused the accident; that the vehicle accelerated from the tree to the planter after Mrs. Peters was unconscious and, therefore, was unable to press the accelerator with her foot; that General Motors engineers became concerned in the late 1980s that the cruise control system might cause sudden unwanted acceleration and recommended that General Motors install another type of system; and that General Motors had never warned customers about the defective nature of the cruise control system, the evidence was sufficient to make a submissible case of strict liability — design defect, strict liability — failure to warn, and negligence.”
Day on Torts