As a Chicago personal injury lawyer I am very pleased to see that after decades of marketing their addictive cancer causing products to children, tobacco companies are feeling the pain a fully informed jury can inflict.
Consider this recent verdict in Florida:
The AP (6/2) reports, “A Florida jury awarded $30 million to a Pensacola widow in a ruling against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco.” This is one of the first cases to be tried since the 2006 Florida Supreme Court Ruling that “threw out a massive class-action award to thousands of smokers and required the cases be proved individually.”
Benny Martin died of lung cancer in 1995 after being a longtime smoker. He began smoking “20 years before cigarettes had warning labels.” According to attorneys for “Benny Martin… the tobacco company conspired to make its products more addictive to customers and withheld information about the dangers of smoking.”
Such deceptive tactics are targeted by the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory legislation that will, if passed, give the FDA a wide array of new powers to regulate the tobacco industry. These new powers include the ability to regulate the marketing and advertising of tobacco products.
