After a four-week trial in Middlesex Superior Court, a jury found cigarette company Philip Morris USA, Inc. liable of negligence, fraud, conspiracy, and breach of implied warranty of merchantability.
The lawsuit was filed by the family of Barbara Fontaine, a life-long smoker who died of lung cancer in 2017.
The jury awarded the Fontaine family $8.014 million in compensatory damages. This amount was intended to cover pain and suffering, medical bills, and loss of consortium.
The jury then added a staggering $1 billion in punitive damages.
The trial judge rightfully brought that number down to Earth, reducing punitive damages to $56 million.
Nevertheless, Philip Morris appealed the verdict and the damages.
The company’s lawyers argued, in part, that the size of the jury’s punitive damages award demonstrated in and of itself that the jurors were swept away by passion and prejudice such that the entire verdict must be set aside.
Additionally, Philip Morris contended that the $56 million in punitive damages set by the trial judge was “constitutionally excessive.”
The SJC rejected all of Philip Morris’s claims.
We conclude that the judge had ample basis upon which to find that the jury were not inflamed by passion or prejudice and, accordingly, that the judge did not abuse her discretion in denying Philip Morris’s motion for a new trial on that basis. We also conclude that the judge remitted the punitive damages to an amount that was within constitutionally permissible bounds.
The full text of the slip opinion is attached below.