$90.8 Million Verdict Against R.J. Reynolds for Widow of Lifelong Smoker

Frank Townsend picked up cigarettes as a boy of thirteen and never managed to put them down. Like thousands of Floridians whose claims were revived by the state supreme court's Engle decision, his story ended with lung cancer, and it fell to his widow, Lyantie, to take the fight to R.J. Reynolds. Her case landed in the Alachua County Circuit Court in Gainesville, with Morgan & Morgan's Keith Mitnik, the firm's senior trial counsel and one of the most prolific plaintiff's trial lawyers in the country, trying it alongside managing partner Gregory Prysock.

The trial turned on a question at the heart of every Engle-progeny case: how much of the blame belongs to a company that engineered and marketed an addictive product, and how much to the smoker who couldn't quit? On April 21, 2010, the jury gave its answer, assigning 51 percent of the fault to R.J. Reynolds and 49 percent to Frank Townsend himself. It awarded $10.8 million in compensatory damages for Lyantie's loss, and then added $80 million in punitive damages, a number aimed squarely at the company's decades of conduct.

At roughly $90.8 million, the verdict ranked among the largest of the early Engle-progeny wave and drew national attention to the string of tobacco trials Morgan & Morgan was then running across Florida. The trial court entered judgment at $5.5 million compensatory and $40.8 million punitive, reflecting the comparative-fault split.

Reynolds appealed, and the appellate history deserves telling straight. In 2012 Florida's First District Court of Appeal affirmed the compensatory award, calling it at the outer limit of reasonableness but within the jury's province, while holding the $40.8 million punitive figure constitutionally excessive and sending it back for remittitur or a new trial. On remand the trial court cut the punitive award to $20 million. Mrs. Townsend accepted; Reynolds refused and demanded a new trial, but the appellate courts held the company to the remitted number.

The final judgment, $5.5 million compensatory plus $20 million punitive, $25.5 million in all, was a fraction of the jury's headline figure, yet it remained one of the more substantial recoveries of the Engle-progeny era and cemented Mitnik's reputation as a courtroom closer that defense firms would study for years. Reynolds American's own SEC filings track the case through each stage, a paper trail that ends with the company paying the judgment.