Florida Supreme Court backs tobacco company in a fight over punitive damages

Share
Scales of Justice Law
Scales of Justice. By www.ccPixs.com (CC).

The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a jury decision that would have required R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to pay $16 million in punitive damages to the family of a woman who died at age 52 of lung cancer.

Justices, in a 5-1 ruling, said the punitive damages award to the estate of Lois Stucky was “excessive.”

The estate went to the Supreme Court in 2021 after the 5th District Court of Appeal overturned a decision by an Orange County jury to award the $16 million.

In part, the dispute focused on the discrepancy between the amounts of punitive and compensatory damages that were awarded.

The jury awarded $300,000 in compensatory damages to Stucky’s adult children, an amount that was reduced to $150,000 because of negligence attributed to Stucky.

Compensatory damages are generally related to compensating people for economic losses or injuries, while punitive damages are a form of punishment.

Thursday’s majority opinion, written by Justice Ricky Polston, said state law “requires a reasonable relationship between punitive damages and the amount of damages proved and the injury suffered.”

It also said that under the state’s wrongful-death law, a punitive damages award must be denied if it “does not bear a reasonable relation to the damages proved and the injury suffered by the statutory beneficiaries,” or Stucky’s children.

“In this case, because no reasonable trial court could have found that the $16 million punitive damages award bears a reasonable relation to the $150,000 net compensatory damages award and the injury suffered by Ms. Stucky’s survivors, the Fifth District correctly reversed the excessive punitive damages award and remanded (to the circuit court) for further proceedings,” Polston wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice Carlos Muniz and Justices Charles Canady, John Couriel and Jamie Grosshans.

Justice Jorge Labarga dissented, while Justice Renatha Francis did not take part in the case.

©2023 The News Service of Florida

Leave a Reply

  • (will not be published)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

You may also like

student meal
Next school year Hillsborough public schools are offering free meals

Hillsborough Public Schools are offering students free meals for the...

Correspondence Through Poetry. A Mind-Numbing Week.

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems by Herbert Gold...

The sound of change: Music’s influence on anti-war and human rights movements

Throughout history, music has served as a powerful catalyst for...

a man in a tye dye shirt talking on a radio microphone
Recreational pot for Florida is on the ballot this fall—let’s talk about it

In four months, Florida voters have the opportunity to vote...

Ways to listen

WMNF is listener-supported. That means we don't advertise like a commercial station, and we're not part of a university.

Ways to support

WMNF volunteers have fun providing a variety of needed services to keep your community radio station alive and kickin'.

Follow us on Instagram

Counterspin
Player position: