$3 Billion Philip Morris Verdict for a Lifelong Marlboro Smoker

Richard Boeken started smoking Marlboros in 1957, when he was ten years old. By fourteen he was smoking two packs a day, and he kept smoking heavily for roughly four decades, through the recurring bronchitis of his twenties and thirties. In 1999 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and underwent surgery, but the disease spread to his lymph nodes and eventually his brain. In March 2000 he sued Philip Morris, the maker of his brand, in Los Angeles Superior Court for negligence, strict product liability, and fraud.

His lawyer was Michael J. Piuze, a Los Angeles trial attorney who tried the case over roughly nine weeks beginning in March 2001. The case Piuze put on was about what Philip Morris knew and what it told the public: decades of denials about addiction and cancer aimed at people like Boeken, who had picked up the habit as a child in the 1950s. In June 2001 the jury returned its verdict: $5,539,127 in compensatory damages and $3 billion in punitive damages. At the time, no individual smoker had ever won more against a tobacco company.

The number did not survive post-trial review, and that has to be stated plainly. In August 2001, Superior Court Judge Charles W. McCoy Jr. ruled the $3 billion figure legally excessive, a ratio of roughly 540 to 1 against the compensatory award, and gave Boeken the choice of accepting $100 million in punitive damages or retrying the punitive case. Even while cutting the award, McCoy called Philip Morris's conduct reprehensible in every sense of the word, both legal and moral, and noted the company had refused to accept even a scintilla of responsibility for the harm it had done. Piuze objected that the reduction amounted to fining Philip Morris one week's earnings. Boeken accepted, and an amended judgment for $100 million in punitives was entered in September 2001.

Richard Boeken died of lung cancer at his home in Topanga on January 16, 2002. He was 57. The appeal went on without him. In September 2004 the Court of Appeal rejected nearly all of Philip Morris's arguments on liability but held that even $100 million was excessive, conditioning affirmance on a further reduction to $50 million, a result it reaffirmed in its final 2005 opinion. The California Supreme Court denied review, and on March 20, 2006 the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Philip Morris's appeal, leaving the judgment final: about $5.5 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

The public record therefore runs from $3 billion to $50 million, and both figures matter. The verdict marked the moment a single dying smoker persuaded a jury to punish Philip Morris on a scale no individual case had reached before, and the $50 million judgment that survived every level of review remained among the largest individual smoker recoveries ever collected. Michael J. Piuze, who followed this case a year later with the $28 billion Bullock verdict against the same defendant, died in 2020. This page preserves the case as a documented court record rather than a promotion of any active practice.