Jacqueline Miller was so addicted to smoking that she couldn’t kick the habit even after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. But now a Florida jury has awarded $17.3 million in damages in a case brought against Lorillard Inc. for its role in getting her hooked.
“The last weeks of her life, she’s still smoking cigarettes,” Bruce Anderson, a lawyer for Miller’s daughter, told the jury in Jacksonville. “She even has her daughter-in-law, who’s not a smoker, puffing smoke into her face when she’s too weak to lift a cigarette and smoke herself.”
Miller, who began smoking in high school, died of lung cancer in 1994 at age 63. She mostly smoked the Lorillard brands Old Gold, Kent and Max. The verdict included $6 million in compensatory damages and $11.3 million in punitive damages.
According to Courtroom View Network, which televised the trial, Anderson said Miller bore some responsibility “for smoking the cigarettes that caused her to suffer lung cancer.” But he insisted that “Lorillard Tobacco Company also made choices. They made intentional choices … that were influenced by money.”
The jury assessed 65 percent of the blame to Lorillard and the remainder to Miller herself. That left a net award of $11.2 million in the case, which was brought by Miller’s daughter, Michelle Mrozek.
The Miller case was originally part of a class-action lawsuit against the tobacco industry filed on behalf of all Florida smokers with tobacco-related illnesses. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court reversed a jury verdict of $145 billion in that case, finding it should not have been tried as a class action. But crucially, the ruling allowed the plaintiffs to use the jury’s liability findings in litigating individual claims.
As a result, plaintiffs do not have to prove tobacco companies sold a defective product and hid the risks of smoking; they have to show only that they were addicted to smoking and that cigarettes caused an illness or a smoker’s death.
The Associated Press reported last month that — since the decision in the 2006 case, known as Engle v. Liggett Group — Florida juries awarded more than $360 million in about two-dozen smoking cases. Now the Miller award boosts the total further.
The defense has appealed all the verdicts, so they could be reduced, but in December an appeals court upheld a $28.3 million award to the wife of a dead smoker who sued R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Lorillard officials could not be reached for comment about the Miller case late Thursday.
In the Miller case, Lorillard lawyer Dan Molony asked the jury to consider whether Miller was so addicted that she lost her free will. “The evidence will show, I will submit to you,” he said, “that Ms. Miller enjoyed smoking, and she enjoyed it from the beginning until almost the end of her life.”
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