Philip Morris USA Loses Appeal of Widow’s Label Warning Win
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Philip Morris USA lost an appeal of a $4.93 million award to the widow of a man who said he wouldn’t have started smoking when he was 13 years old in the 1960s if he had known it caused cancer, in the latest setback for cigarette companies battling historic wrongful-death litigation.
The New York federal judge who oversaw a jury trial in 2013 wasn’t wrong to allow as evidence a recorded claim by the widow’s late husband, David Mulholland, that he would have heeded packaging warnings if they had been in use when he was a teenager, the U.S. appeals court in Manhattan ruled today.