A Broward County jury awarded $132,000 in the death of a Florida woman who smoked cigarettes for more than 50 years.
Dorothy Milinkovich’s daughter Deborah Neff alleged in Neff v. R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris that her mother became a lifelong smoker after starting at 14 years old and that she smoked more than three packs a day.
Neff blamed the tobacco companies, R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris, for Milinkovich’s deadly lung cancer because they created addictive cigarettes, and allegedly hid the dangers of smoking from the masses, according to media reports.
Clark
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“What interests me are the portals these cases open in regard to legal analytics," said Nicole Clark, business and litigation attorney and founder of Trellis Law, an artificial intelligence-powered legal database. "The Engle progeny trials give us an opportunity to ask interesting questions about the litigation landscape in various jurisdictions. The data is there for us to unpack the ways in which different legal-medical arguments about addiction resonate with juries, and how those arguments inform the ways in which juries apportion fault.”
Engle progeny claims were formed after Howard Engle filed a class action lawsuit that the Florida Supreme Court decertified, which paved the way for individual class members to pursue their own legal actions against the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
The 1994 litigation represented some 100,000 smokers who were addicted to nicotine.
Engle, a Miami Beach physician, was a lifelong smoker and plaintiff in the lawsuit in which Engle alleged he smoked a few packs of cigarettes every day, according to media reports. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lymphoma killed Engle on July 22, 2009.
“Any compensatory damages are subject to reduction based on the percent of fault for which the jury finds the plaintiff responsible,” Clark told the Florida Record. “This is where things get tricky. What does addiction mean for the purposes of legal cause or causal responsibility? What does it mean to be 60, 70, or 80 percent responsible for a harm? This can all be very new and very awkward for jurors, as many of us don’t think about addiction, causality, and responsibility in these terms in our day-to-day lives.”
At 71 years old, Milinkovich died in 1994 but the jury only allocated 25% of blame to R.J. Reynolds and 75% to Milinkovich who allegedly did not smoke Phillip Morris-brand cigarettes.
“Within the philosophy of law, we make certain assumptions about reality, particularly when it comes to causation, responsibility, and accountability,” Clark added. “These assumptions presuppose a world wherein most harms are caused by agentive individuals—not events or mechanisms.”