WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Gripping his walker and smiling broadly, 91-year-old David Cohen on Thursday praised a Palm Beach County jury for helping him avenge his wife’s death.
After deliberating for roughly five hours over two days, the six jurors ordered three of the nation’s biggest cigarette-makers to pay the Delray Beach man $1.2 million for turning his wife into a hopeless nicotine addict, which ultimately led to her death from lung cancer at age 81.
“Justice has been served,” he said. “She would have demanded it.”
The jurors held Helen Cohen 40 percent responsible for her own death, apparently finding that she should have quit long before her lungs were hopelessly damaged. That shaved $800,000 off the $2 million they said David Cohen deserved for enduring his wife’s slow and painful descent – from emphysema in the 1990s to her 2006 death.
While the $1.2 million is far less than his attorneys asked for, neither they nor Cohen voiced any disappointment.
Attorney Scott Schlesinger, who represented Cohen during the nearly month-long trial, praised his elderly client for toughing it out against great odds.
“More people have climbed Mount Everest than have gotten verdicts against tobacco companies,” he said.
Attorneys for R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard and Liggett declined comment. Philip Morris was not held responsible for Cohen’s death. Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Meenu Sasser ruled that Cohen rarely smoked its brands.
But the jury of four women and two men clearly wanted to make Philip Morris pay. In their initial verdict, they said Phillip Morris was 15 percent responsible for Cohen’s death. However, because of Sasser’s ruling and the way the six-page verdict form was crafted, there was no way they could legally blame the maker of Marlboro, Merit and other brands.
After the verdict was announced, Sasser sent the jurors out of the courtroom. For nearly an hour, attorneys argued over how to correct the flawed verdict. The arguments pitted the tobacco companies, who had been a unified force, against each other. Attorneys for the three other companies argued that removing Philip Morris from the verdict would hurt them.
After Sasser ruled she had no other choice, that’s exactly what happened. The jury increased the percentage of responsibility for the other three companies – 30 percent for R.J. Reynolds, 20 percent for Lorillard and 10 percent for Liggett.
The last-minute legal fisticuffs were emblematic of the trial, the objection-packed two days of closing arguments and the road ahead. The tobacco giants are expected to appeal, as they have done consistently since cases stemming from a 1994 class-action lawsuit began going to trial several years ago.
While a Miami jury agreed the tobacco industry should pay $145 billion to smokers and their families, the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 threw out the award. While upholding the jury’s findings that cigarettes are addictive, defective and cause a plethora of health ills, it ruled that damages had to be determined individually.
With thousands of cases pending statewide, Thursday’s verdict means 78 have gone to trial, says the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University. Of those, 54 ended in awards for smokers or their families; the rest were won by cigarette-makers.
So far, in Palm Beach County, three families of smokers have won multimillion-dollar verdicts. Tobacco companies won two others. The same attorneys who represented Cohen – Schlesinger, John Gdanski and Steven Hammer – won a $2.47 million verdict for a Lake Worth smoker’s widow in 2011.
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&Copy;2013 The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Fla.)
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