Jacksonville Jury Awards $11 Million to Smoker Who Needed Two Lung Transplants

Elaine Jordan started smoking as a teenager in the 1960s, before cigarette packs carried warnings, and kept smoking for about four decades, quitting in 2002. She said doctors diagnosed her with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 1993, when she was 44 and working at a saw mill. The disease destroyed her lungs. She stopped working in 1999 as her health failed, underwent a left lung transplant in 2002, and when that lung failed she needed a second lung transplant in 2012. Anti rejection drugs she took after the first transplant caused her kidneys to fail, and later in 2012 she underwent a kidney transplant as well.

Jordan sued Philip Morris USA in Duval County Circuit Court in Jacksonville, one of thousands of Engle progeny cases that followed the Florida Supreme Court's 2006 decision decertifying a statewide class action against the tobacco industry. To use the earlier class findings, Jordan had to prove her disease had manifested by November 21, 1996, a threshold the defense contested throughout trial by arguing there was no medical record of her COPD before June 1999. Jordan's lawyers countered that a routine records purge in 1998 had destroyed earlier documentation, and that her 1999 test results already showed COPD too advanced to have developed suddenly.

The three week trial, presided over by Judge Virginia Norton, included testimony from a historian who told jurors Philip Morris had engaged in decades of fraud and conspired to conceal the health effects and addictive nature of its cigarettes, including advertising aimed at young smokers. Her treating pulmonologist testified that smoking caused her emphysema, and an addiction expert testified that she was addicted to nicotine. Jordan's trial attorney, Laura Shamp, argued the company had hidden what it knew for the sake of profit. Philip Morris countered through defense attorney Walter Cofer that Jordan smoked by choice, understood the risks, and that her COPD may have come from wood dust exposure during her years working at a saw mill.

After eight hours of deliberation, the jury found Jordan qualified as an Engle class member and that Philip Morris's concealment of smoking's dangers and addictiveness had caused her disease. Jurors assigned Philip Morris 60 percent of the fault and Jordan 40 percent, then awarded her $7,795,000 in compensatory damages, covering past and future medical costs, past lost earnings, past lost services, and past and future pain and suffering. They added $3,205,000 in punitive damages. Both the reporter who covered the trial and the verdict report that followed recorded her total award as $11 million, which her counsel had told jurors was about what the company earned in a single day.

Philip Morris appealed the judgment. Florida's First District Court of Appeal affirmed without opinion on April 3, 2018, then denied rehearing that May. The company asked the United States Supreme Court to take the case, arguing that letting Engle plaintiffs rely on the old class findings violated its due process rights, and the justices denied review in February 2019. A second appeal followed over the attorney fee award Jordan won under Florida's offer of judgment statute, and the First District affirmed that award in January 2022. No appellate court disturbed the $11 million, which stands as the jury returned it in August 2015.