Although many state and federal courts have thrown out similar class actions, on the ground that individual claims differ too much to be tried together, anti-tobacco lawyers are hopeful that Florida's supreme court will eventually uphold the verdict. Still, although there are now hundreds of similar suits pending against the industry across the country, and despite high-profile settlements with state governments, the industry has never paid a dollar to a former smoker on a tobacco product liability claim. There have been a handful of individual verdicts against the industry in recent years, but none has yet emerged from appeals. Grady Carter's case is closest. This month, the Florida Supreme Court declined to reconsider its decision reinstating his verdict, which sets up a possible final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Company lawyers say that they plan to file a petition for high court review.
Still, juries continue to hold smokers responsible for their smoke-related illnesses in some cases. On Jan. 16, the tobacco industry won a verdict in a Brooklyn case brought by the family of a woman who died of lung cancer. Although a six-woman jury found that cigarettes were the cause of Bonnie Apostolou's death, they also decided that she had assumed the risk of smoking. Plaintiffs' lawyers in the current wave of tobacco litigation have tried to avoid the problems of litigating individual suits by aggregating thousands, even millions, of smokers into class actions. But besides the Engle case in Florida and a case pending in Louisiana, almost every class action to compensate smokers for death and disease has been dismissed on the ground that the claims are too different to be tried together.