Jury orders Philip Morris to pay ex-smoker $28bn

A jury in California has awarded record damages of $28bn (£17.8bn) to a former smoker who blamed Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, for giving her lung cancer.

The award is almost certain to be reduced on appeal, and could be overturned altogether in the light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that offers some comfort to America's besieged tobacco giants. The previous highest damages of $3bn, also against Philip Morris, were set by another California jury and reduced in the higher courts to $100m.

Yesterday's decision was never the less a blow for Philip Morris, which had decided to alter its usual courtroom tactics and tried to blame the victim for her decision to keep smoking. In the past, Philip Morris and other tobacco companies have argued – unsuccessfully, for the most part – that their marketing practices had not been deceptive and that they therefore bore no responsibility for the health of their customers.

The plaintiff in the latest case, Betty Bullock, 64, started smoking when she was 17 and was diagnosed last year with lung cancer. The disease has since spread to her liver. Her champion in court was the tobacco litigation specialist Michael Piuze, who has consistently talked juries into awarding dizzying punitive damages to his clients.

In this case, he argued that Philip Morris concealed the dangers of cigarettes with a widespread campaign of disinformation beginning in the 1950s. He called it "the largest fraud scheme ever perpetrated by corporations anywhere". Mr Piuze used photographs of Mrs Bullock, cigarette adverts from her teenage years and internal tobacco industry documents to lay out his contention that Philip Morris concealed the dangers of cigarettes.

The tobacco company tried to lay responsibility at Mrs Bullock's door, arguing that it was her decision to keep smoking through her adult life. "Ms Bullock was aware of the health risks of smoking and was warned repeatedly of those risks by her doctors over four decades, and her daughter also urged her to quit," Philip Morris's in-house lawyer, William Ohlemeyer, said. "Her response: 'I am an adult, this is my business'."

The first phase of the trial ended last month, with the jury awarding Mrs Bullock $750,000 in economic damages and $100,000 for pain and suffering. The $28bn was a purely punitive strike against Philip Morris.

The major tobacco companies are hoping to reverse their dismal run of luck in the courts with the help of a Supreme Court ruling in August that most statements and acts by tobacco companies between 1988 and 1998 were inadmissible as evidence because of a law, that has since been repealed, shielding them from liability.

It was not immediately clear whether the ruling would help Philip Morris in the Bullock case but legal experts say it could lead to the repeal of at least three other recent cases.

There was some modest good news for the tobacco companies in Miami, where a jury threw out a suit from a US Airways flight attendant who blamed her chronic sinusitis on secondary smoke.

The attendant's case followed a 1998 legal settlement in which non-smoking cabin crew members were authorised to seek compensation if they could show their health problems were caused by cigarette smoke.