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Tobacco company sued for 152 million, "Dont shoot, I'll smoke the cigarette"!!? |
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This article is from CNN....... Please give honest feedback. The son of Marie Evans sued Lorillard Tobacco Company, the maker of Newport cigarettes for handling out free cigarettes in a poor Boston neighborhood in the early 1960s to lure African American children to smoke. Marie Evans died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 54. She started smoking Newports at age 13, according to her family. A Boston jury ordered Lorillard Tobacco Comapany $81M in punitive damages and $71M in compensatory damages. Lorillard Tobacco Company denies giving free cigarettes in the 1960s to black children and says it will appeal the jury’s decision. The plaintiff, Willie Evans, said the company handed out Newport cigarettes to children like his mother, Marie Evans, during the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Orchard Park neighborhood of Boston. “It’s certainly bittersweet,” Evans said. “If I had my choice, I would have preferred the tobacco company not to have given my mother cigarettes as a 9-year-old child.” Marie Evans died at age 54 after suffering from small cell lung cancer, according to the criminal complaint. Her family said that Lorillard “developed techniques to manipulate and control the nicotine delivery of its cigarettes so as to create and sustain addiction in smokers, including Marie Evans.” according to the complaint. Lorillard says those claims are unfounded. The company is the third largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the United States, according to a company statement. It said it plans to appeal. “Lorillard respectfully disagrees with the jury’s verdict and denies the plaintiff’s claim that the company sampled to children or adults at Orchard Park in the early 1960s,” said spokesman Gregg Perry. Jurors listened to a video deposition from Evans recorded three weeks before her death in 2002 in which she described receiving cigarettes from Lorillard when she was a child. “Hopefully this does allow other people to come forward, and gives them confidence to move their cases forward,” Evans said after tearfully embracing his attorney when the verdict was read. But Lorillard contends that Evans’ “50-year-old memories were persuasively contradicted by testimony from several witnesses,” Perry said. I have a very hard time understanding the constitutional grounds for which this tobacco company was sued for a cigarette that was not forced into the lungs of this woman. I am not apathetic to her death and I dont want one to think that i am being harsh. I use to smoke and I know that when i put that cig into my lung I took a chance. This woman was not behind the barrel of a gun. So what if she was persuaded and enticed to smoke, she still had a choice. If this is an example of how our courts work then I'm going to sue the makers of opiod prescription drugs because they caused me a two time prison sentence and 11 felonies. But hey it wasnt my fault. They enticed me to take their drug and now I'm having a hard time trying to find a job. This is why responsibility in America is becoming obsolete and a pretense of moral standard. America has evolved to a state of expectancy as opposed to a working nation, taking responsibility for the infallicies. Wake up people. There is going to be a time when coffee is going to be responsible for a person who fell to their death from a heart attack. |
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