$52.3 Million Cigarette Design Verdict Survives Eight Years of Appeals and a Post-Trial Recalculation

Barbara Izzarelli started smoking Salem cigarettes at 12 years old. By the time she was in her late thirties, she had laryngeal cancer, a disease strongly tied to smoking that had required removal of her larynx. She sued R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the maker of Salems, in federal court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, arguing that the cigarettes themselves were defectively designed.

The case David Golub built for her did not rest on failure to warn. Connecticut's product liability statute lets a plaintiff argue that a product, warnings aside, could reasonably have been made safer without losing what makes it useful to consumers. Izzarelli's team argued Reynolds had engineered Salem cigarettes to deliver nicotine more efficiently and addictively than they needed to, through choices like ammonia additives and filter design, and that a differently designed cigarette would still have been a cigarette.

In 2010, the jury agreed. It found Reynolds liable and awarded Izzarelli close to $8 million in compensatory damages, apportioning a share of fault to her as a smoker under Connecticut's comparative negligence rules. It was one of the few cigarette design defect verdicts in the country to hold up past a trial court.

Reynolds appealed, and the case entered a long procedural path. The federal appeal reached the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which in turn asked the Connecticut Supreme Court to weigh in on an unsettled question of state law: what standard governs a design defect claim against a cigarette manufacturer when the product is inherently dangerous even when made as intended. The Connecticut Supreme Court answered in 2016, and the Second Circuit applied that answer to affirm the verdict in 2017. Reynolds asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case; the Court denied certiorari in February 2018, closing off further review and leaving the jury's finding of liability final.

With liability settled, what remained was arithmetic. Connecticut allows punitive damages in product liability cases to be calculated as a multiple of the plaintiff's litigation costs, and the case had generated those costs over the better part of a decade of trial and appeal. Post-verdict interest had also been accruing on the judgment the entire time. In December 2018, a federal judge recalculated the punitive award and applied the accrued interest, bringing the total judgment to a range reported as $52.3 million to $52.4 million, a figure many times the original compensatory award.

The case is cited in tobacco litigation circles less for the initial verdict than for what it proved was possible: that a design defect theory, distinct from the failure-to-warn claims that dominate cigarette litigation, could survive full appellate review under state law and produce a judgment that grew rather than shrank over the course of the appeal. For Izzarelli, the amount that finally stood reflected not just what the jury found in 2010 but everything Reynolds's own appeal cost in the years after.