FL Appeals Court Hears Argument to Restore Sick Smokers' $145B Class-Action Award

By Bill Kaczor

The state's high court heard an appeal Tuesday on behalf of sick Florida smokers seeking to punish the tobacco industry for "fraud and deceit" by restoring a $145 billion class-action award, the largest ever by an American jury. The smokers' lawyers told the Florida Supreme Court that it should reduce the amount if the justices think it is too large, as long as they also reverse an appellate court decision that overturned the 2000 Miami verdict and punitive judgment.

That opinion totally ignores a half-century of fraud and deceit by the tobacco industry, fraud and deceit which shocked the conscience of a seasoned trial judge who sat there for two years listening to 157 witnesses and examining thousands of documents," Stanley Rosenblatt told the high court.

Rosenblatt and his wife, Susan, shepherded the case, which accused the industry of misleading people about the dangers of smoking, through the two-year trial and a pair of appeals to the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Miami.

The husband-and-wife legal team won the first appeal, which certified the case as a class action on behalf of an estimated 300,000 to 700,000 ill Floridians.

After the trial, however, the appellate court ruled that certification was a mistake, tossing the award.

The Rosenblatts said those differences could be resolved without disturbing the class-action verdict by holding short proceedings to determine medical costs and other compensatory damages instead of retrying issues common to each case thousands of times.

Justice R. Fred Lewis cited decisions by other courts that agree with Scherker's position, but Stanley Rosenblatt said they were not "remotely similar to this case."

He compared it, instead, to Brown v. Board of Education, the racial discrimination case that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision that separate public schools for blacks and whites are inherently unequal.

"In the court of American law there is such an outrageous injustice that steps have to be taken," he said.

The high court typically takes several months to rule on such appeals.