Cigarette verdict may be felt across US

By Milton J. Valencia and Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff I December 21,2010
It was hardly only Marie Evans. The Rev. Michael E. Haynes, retired pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, said he saw attractive young women in green outfits handing out cigarettes to people 50 years ago in Frederick Douglass Square, the heart of the city's black community.
Leroy M. Jenkins, 73, who grew up in Roxbury's Orchard Park near Evans and her family, said he received some of the cigarettes as a teenager after finishing classes for the day at Dearborn Middle School.
"They'd be out there waiting for us," Jenkins said in an interview.
The family of Evans, who died of lung cancer in 2002, more than 40 years after she was induced to smoke Newport cigarettes as a teenager, won an individual lawsuit last week against Lorillard Inc., but the groundbreaking case has exposed an industrywide marketing strategy that began a half-century ago to promote cigarettes to youngsters. In Evans's case it was Newport, a brand particularly popular among young smokers and the black community. Tobacco companies deny targeting youngsters in the campaigns.
But with the unprecedented, $152 million jury judgment in favor of Evans's family, the case could have a ripple effect on court decisions and public policy decisions across the country, as smokers weigh whether to file their own lawsuits and federal officials consider a ban on menthol cigarettes.
"This is an important decision, in that it shows that tobacco litigation is still alive and well," said Michael Siegel, a tobacco control specialist with the Boston University School of Public Health. 'There's kind of a perception that tobacco companies have paid their dues, and we're moving forward, but this shows from the public perception that we're not done yet, and that the public wants justice."
The judgment, $71 million in compensatory damages for Evans's estate and her son, and $81 million in punitive damages for her estate, is among the largest in the country from a tobacco wrongful death suit, and the largest for any trial in a Massachusetts court, industry analysts said. And it's not over yet: Judge Elizabeth Fahey, who presided over the trial in Suffolk Superior Court, is considering whether to award more money under the state's consumer protection laws.
Lorillard, based in Greensboro, N.C., acknowledged a sampling strategy a half-century ago but denied ever passing out cigarettes to youngsters or targeting minorities. The company, which never lost a lawsuit brought by an individual until Dec. 14, plans to appeal the jury's decision.
The Evans case was based in large part on the tobacco industry's internal documents that exposed a misinformation campaign, and an effort to specifically market to youngsters.
One letter filed with the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, an archive of millions of industry documents released under lawsuits and kept by the University of California at San Francisco, shows that Senator Orrin G