“Former Texas Attorney General Dan Morales was sentenced Friday to four years in prison for filing a false income tax return and mail fraud in a case stemming from the state’s $17 billion tobacco settlement.” Although Morales had entered a guilty plea as part of a plea agreement, “he insisted most of the accusations about public misdeeds were untrue.” (AP/Tyler Morning Telegraph , Oct. 31; Janet Elliott, “Morales ordered to prison”, Houston Chronicle, Nov. 1). Background: Oct. 2, Jul. 17, Jun. 26 and links from there.
Posts Tagged ‘tobacco’
First-rate bilge on secondhand smoke
Jacob Sullum eviscerates an embarrassingly bad op-ed that the New York Times chose to run yesterday (Rosemary Ellis, “The Secondhand Smoking Gun”, Oct. 15) on the issue of smoking in public places, based on the supposed “Helena miracle” — heart attacks in the Montana capital (population 26,000) are said to have dropped suddenly by 58 percent when smoking in public buildings was banned. The claim, he says, is based on a single unpublished study “involving tiny, highly volatile numbers”. Had the Times been interested in whether the asserted result would hold up as a matter of epidemiology, it could easily have checked out the experience of other jurisdictions which could offer much, much larger sample sizes than wee Helena: “why have we not heard about a dramatic drop in heart attacks [in New York City itself] since the city’s smoking ban took effect in April”? A few phone calls to Columbia-Presbyterian, St. Lukes-Roosevelt and the city’s other big hospitals should suffice to establish whether there had been any massive effect of this sort on New Yorkers’ proneness to cardiac arrest. (Reason Hit & Run, Oct. 16; Jacob Sullum, “Heartstopping Discovery”, Reason, Apr. 4). More: Cato’s Steven Milloy weighs in (“Secondhand smoke scam”, FoxNews.com, Oct. 17).
Secondhand smoke vs. firsthand contraband
One of the larger costs from the lack of tort reform is not so much the damages awards to undeserving plaintiffs or the fees that plaintiffs’ lawyers extract or the cost of hiring lawyers to defend, but the social costs imposed when decisions are made to avoid the risk of litigation: playgrounds shut down, bans on cold weather swimming (“Don’t be so wet”, The Economist, Oct. 2 (subscription required)).
The repercussions have been particularly severe in Colorado, where a fear of secondhand smoking suits caused the prison system there, where the vast majority of the 18,000 prisoners incarcerated are smokers, to ban tobacco. The result? An immediate creation of a black market with markups for tobacco far exceeding that for cocaine, and the expected associated violence and corruption that goes along with a widespread black market in prison. Eighteen guards, teachers, and supervisors have been prosecuted in three years, and a prisoner newsletter calls the tobacco contraband law “a retirement assistance program for correctional officers.” (Kirk Mitchell, “Ban turns tobacco into prison prize”, Denver Post, Oct. 13).
Tobacco recoupment suit loses in France
Declining to follow our bad example: “A French health authority has lost its attempt to sue four tobacco companies for the cost of treating thousands of cancer patients. In the first case of its kind in France, the national health insurance fund (CPAM) in Saint-Nazaire had demanded 18.6m euros from BAT-Rothmans, Philip Morris, JTI-Reynolds and Altadis. The CPAM said it was the amount it had spent treating more than 1,000 people with smoking-related diseases.” A court threw out the action as ungrounded in law. “‘It is interesting to note that no jurisdiction in Europe has so far allowed this kind of surrogate action against cigarette manufacturers,’ said BAT in a statement.” (“Health fund loses tobacco fight”, BBC, Sept. 29)(see Oct. 7, 1999 (Israel) and Feb. 1-3, 2002 (foreign governments suing in U.S. courts).
Update: Missouri tobacco fees
The Missouri Supreme Court has refused to entertain a legal challenge to the $111-million fee bonanza awarded to private attorneys who represented the state in its relatively late tagalong lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had decried the fee award as a “political gravy train” which “grossly overpays the lawyers involved”, who had plenty of friends in high places in Missouri politics (see our coverage of Sept. 21, 2000 and Jun. 5, 2001). (“Court turns down appeal of tobacco attorney fees”, AP/Jefferson City News Tribune, Oct. 2) (via Lori Patel, Law.com). Ethical Esq.? (Oct. 3) comments on the case, citing a pertinent passage from the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct, as well as our previous coverage.
Mother leaves daughter unattended, collects $2 million
In 1992, Shelly Moore, against Texas law, left her infant daughter Shannon unattended in a car. “In a deposition in 1996, Moore acknowledged that she had been using a faulty lighter that at times continued to flame after she lighted a cigarette and had to be blown out. Several witnesses testified in depositions that Moore told them she thought she had lighted a cigarette as she left the car, then absent-mindedly tossed the lighter on the seat.” The car burst into flames, and Shannon was horrifically burned, eventually losing all of her fingers and her hearing.
Moore and her daughter moved to Johnson County, Texas, a notoriously plaintiff-friendly region, and Shannon sued…Philip Morris, who made the Marlboro 100s Shelly smoked. (Shannon named her mother as a codefendant; where one named plaintiff and one named defendant are citizens of the same state, a defendant is unable to remove the case to federal court on diversity jurisdictional grounds.) The claim was that a smoldering cigarette caused a fire, and Shannon’s injuries were the tobacco company’s fault for failing to design a cigarette that would not stop burning. Rather than risk putting the case in front of a jury that would be exposed to photos of Shannon’s terrible burns, Philip Morris settled for $2 million. Fifteen previous cases alleging product liability over cigarette fires had been dismissed before trial. (Myron Levin, “Tobacco Giant, in a Shift, Pays Victim”, L.A. Times, Oct. 2). More on case: J. R. Labbe, “Somebody has to pay”, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 5.
Murr to plead guilty in tobacco-fee case
“Next: No Cigs in Your Car”
“Smoking even in the privacy of your own car could be banned under one of at least five state bills introduced in the past year to limit where a person can light up.” The car smoking ban would apply whenever children — including the smoker’s own children — were present in a car. For earlier proposals along these lines, see Jun. 3-4, 2002 and Oct. 5, 2001. (Kenneth Lovett, New York Post, Sept. 22).
Tobacco: AGs push Hollywood self-censorship
“In a stunning, courageous admission that they no longer have any serious work left to do, attorneys general in two dozen states recently sent a letter to the Motion Picture Association of America asking that Hollywood minimize smoking in movies so youngsters won’t be gulled into lighting up.” (Nick Gillespie, “Tinselectomy”, Reason, Aug. 29). Check out Gillespie’s list of other destructive behaviors that Hollywood glamorizes, especially the last item. Supposedly the self-censorship will be voluntary: “We’re not saying any law has been broken,” said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a rather remarkable admission since there is precisely zero reason for any filmmaker to pay attention to this particular grouping of law enforcement functionaries other than the fear that they could cause some sort of legal trouble in the future unless placated. (“States Ask Hollywood to Cut Film Smoking “, AP/Fox News, Aug. 27).
Our editor interviewed
Last week this site’s editor visited the Sooner State to speak to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, in conjunction with which visit commentator/radio host Brandon Dutcher recorded this informal Q & A which touches on the tobacco and fast food litigation, the prophetic role of former Okla. Sen. Fred Harris, and more (“No Joke: Lawsuit Abuse Hurts Us All”, interview with Walter Olson, OCPA Perspective, August)