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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Smoker's Widow Seeks Revenge Against Tobacco Company [01/06-2]
Excerpts from: After a Death, Revenge Isn't So Sweet
By WILLIAM GLABERSON New
York Times [01/06/04]
Harry W. Frankson was a big, strong guy. It seems possible, his widow said the
other day, that he never really believed cigarettes would kill him.
Until the doctor told him it was too late. Lung cancer.
In five months, he was dead. He was 57. He had smoked Lucky Strikes almost continuously since he was 14. Mrs. Frankson wanted revenge against the company that sold the cigarettes and, for years, she said, made them seem harmless and fun.
She got a taste of retribution on Dec. 18, in what could be a watershed lawsuit against a tobacco company. A Brooklyn jury ordered the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation to pay her $175,000 as compensation.
It was the first defeat for a tobacco company in the New York State courts in a suit over an individual smoker's death. And it was the first in the Northeast since an early, and eventually abandoned, case in New Jersey in 1988. In its verdict, the jury said Mr. Frankson and the company were each 50 percent responsible for his illness. The company says it will appeal.
But the true measure of Mrs. Frankson's revenge could come this week. Tomorrow, the same jury in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn (Kings County) is to begin considering the next phase of the case, whether to force the company to pay punitive damages that could amount to millions of dollars.
In other parts of the country, smokers or their families have been chipping away since 1996 at the industry's formidable record of winning cases involving the claims of individual smokers. So far, smokers or their families have won 13 cases nationwide, according to the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University, which works to foster lawsuits against the industry. Such suits are not as complicated as they once were because so much information is available about the health effects of smoking, said Richard A. Daynard, chairman of the liability project. The Brooklyn case, Mr. Daynard said, "is very important because it shows that cases can be brought and won" everywhere, including before the potentially generous New York juries. In the last three years, tobacco companies defeated smokers' claims in three similar cases in Brooklyn and Queens.
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