Citing inadequate jury instructions, a Florida appeals court has tossed out damages awards totaling $15.5 million against R.J. Reynolds in the case of a long-term smoker who died of throat cancer.
In the case of Frances Bessent-Dixon v. R.J. Reynolds, the First District Court of Appeal last month reversed a trial court’s award in the case and granted the tobacco company a new trial. The litigation was among thousands of cases in the legal system that resulted from a state Supreme Court ruling more than a decade ago that partially decertified a tobacco class-action lawsuit and allowed for such cases to be tried individually.
“The trial court erred when it failed to instruct the jury that to prove the intentional tort of conspiracy to fraudulently conceal information, (the appellee) was required to prove that the decedent relied to his detriment on a false statement by Reynolds,” the Jan. 15 decision authored by Judge Bradford Thomas states.
Attorney Celene Humphries
The appeals court remanded the case for a new trial in which the jury instructions must comply with previous court decisions. The court’s ruling overturns a compensatory damages award of $2 million and a punitive damages award amounting to $13.5 million, which would have gone to the family of Tyrone Dixon.
An attorney for the family, Celene Humphries, said the decision helps to illustrate the complexities of proving the allegation that tobacco companies engaged in fraudulent concealment. Florida case law holds that liability for fraudulent concealment hinges on a plaintiff relying on a specific false statement by the defendant within a certain time frame.
“A critical fact in this litigation is that we are definitely David versus Goliath,” Humphries told the Florida Record, indicating that large law firms representing tobacco companies have historically been light years ahead of plaintiffs on the nuances of tobacco litigation in the state.
When the Engle v. Liggett Group Inc. class action was decertified by the state Supreme Court, there were potentially hundreds of thousands of tobacco cases flowing from the Engle jury findings, according to Humphries. But less than 1 percent of the original class action got their cases filed in a timely manner, she said.
Plaintiffs have to show that the specifics of their situations fit with the rules for proving fraudulent concealment, she said. This is the case even though the Engle jury found that cigarettes were a hazardous, addictive commodity and that tobacco firms failed to disclose the serious risks associated with smoking.
“A fraudulent concealment count is actually pretty unusual,” Humphries said. “When you see a cause of action for fraud, it’s usually based on misrepresentation rather than concealment. … This decision is about how do you prove causation when the thing that caused the injury was something never said?”