Word: liggett
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...Cipollone family and other would-be plaintiffs may find some encouragement in the latest decision. The lower-court ruling was rather narrow, declaring that the Liggett Group, which made the Chesterfield and L&M cigarettes Cipollone favored, violated a so-called express warranty that its products are safe. But the appeals court opened the way to a new trial on the broader question of whether the tobacco company was negligent in marketing cigarettes when it knew of medical evidence suggesting that smoking is hazardous...
...husband Tony filed a liability claim, which she made him promise to pursue after her death, though no one had ever won such a case against a cigarette maker. Last week the five-year-old lawsuit made history when a six-member federal jury in Newark ordered the Liggett Group, maker of the Chesterfield and L&M brands, to pay Tony Cipollone $400,000 in compensatory damages for its contribution to his wife's death. Of more than 300 lawsuits filed against tobacco companies since 1954, this case was the first in which the defendant was held at least partly...
...cancer, a connection the industry still denies. A 1961 report produced by Philip Morris listed the specific cancer-causing ingredients in cigarette smoke, concluding, "Carcinogens are found in practically every class of compounds in smoke." Another study, prepared the same year by the Arthur D. Little consulting firm for Liggett, stated, "There are biologically active materials present in cigarette tobacco that are (a) cancer causing (b) cancer promoting (c) poisonous (d) stimulating, pleasurable, and flavorful...
Even more provocative were the so-called mouse-painting papers, describing experiments in which Liggett scientists swabbed a tobacco condensate on the backs of mice. Liggett acknowledges that some of the rodents grew tumors and died but denies finding any conclusive pattern. The cigarette makers dispute the importance of the Cipollone team's trove of uncovered documents, pointing out that the prosecution lawyers failed to prove their conspiracy charge. Says James Kearney, an attorney for Liggett: "The documents were overhyped and taken out of context to begin with...
...Liggett plans to appeal the Cipollone verdict, contending among other things that the presiding federal judge, H. Lee Sarokin, was biased against the defendants. Says Arthur Stevens, Lorillard's general counsel: "We could not have had a more extreme adversary." In denying one of the tobacco industry's motions for dismissal of the case, Sarokin stated that he believed there was ample evidence of a "tobacco-industry conspiracy, vast in its scope, devious in its purpose and devastating in its results...