The tobacco settlement that has been much in the news in recent years resolved only claims by the States against tobacco companies to seek recovery for funds expended by state governments to care for persons ill from smoking. Claims by individual smokers against tobacco manufacturers and retailers continue throughout the country, and Maryland is no different.
An effort was made in the 1990s to bring a class action lawsuit in Maryland against Big Tobacco. Plaintiffs who bring such actions want the trial court to certify that a case proceed as a class action, a procedure by which those plaintiffs represent the position of themselves and others similarly situated. Under court rules a class may be certified if the potential plaintiffs are so numerous that joining them individually in one suit is not practical, there are common issues of fact and law among class members, and the individual plaintiffs in the suit can fairly protect the class members. Typical class action suits involve issues such as credit card or bank fees, where the financial interest of each individual class member may be so small as to make typical litigation impractical. Members of the class cannot sue individually while the class action is litigated.
The trial court initially certified two classes of plaintiffs: those injured by or addicted to tobacco. The tobacco companies and retailers objected to class certification, and in 2000 were successful in persuading Maryland’s highest court to order “decertification” of the case as a class action. In Phillip Morris v. Angelleti, the Court of Appeals ruled that the individual defenses and other issues for each smoker who may have a claim made class certification inappropriate. Thus, individual smokers were free to continue to bring their own suits for damages.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals, the intermediate appellate court, recently addressed some key issues in cases brought by individuals seeking damages against tobacco companies and sellers. In Christensen v. Phillip Morris, a widow sued a number of tobacco companies and sellers of cigarettes for damages arising from the death of her husband. He had been a cigarette smoker for 30 years, who quit in 1976. In 1998 he learned that he had lung cancer, which his doctors then attributed to the effects of smoking years before. After he died in 2001 his widow brought suit, after the Angeletti ruling allowed such individual suits to proceed.
The trial court threw out Mrs. Christensen’s case based on the statute of limitations, which requires generally that suit be filed within three years of the date of injury, since her husband’s cancer diagnosis was made more than three years before she filed. The appellate court held first that the statute was stayed, or put on hold, during the pendency of the class action as to the defendants in that case. The court held that the trial court needed to decide whether her case against a seller who was not part of the class action suit was filed within three years of when Mr. Christensen discovered that his cancer was related to his past smoking.
This illustrates some of the legal issues that have complicated cases against Big Tobacco, and will likely continue to do so as more such cases are brought. These include whether a smoker assumed the risk of illness or death, so that his or her own conduct bars the claim. While the tobacco companies until recently had been mostly successful in defending such suits, it remains to be seen how such individual cases will fare in Maryland.