By Timothy S. Donahue
Top Takeaways:
- Defense win: A Florida jury sided with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in a lung cancer wrongful death case tied to longtime smoker Stanley Gould.
- Rare case: The lawsuit was not part of Florida’s massive Engle-progeny tobacco litigation.
- Core dispute: Jurors rejected claims Reynolds defectively designed cigarettes and concealed smoking risks.
After less than four hours of deliberation, a Florida jury awarded R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. another courtroom victory in a tobacco-related wrongful death case involving a longtime smoker and former CBS cameraman.
The jury in Miami’s 11th Judicial Circuit found in favor of Reynolds on claims involving defective design, fraud, and conspiracy in the case tied to the 2006 lung cancer death of Stanley Gould. The case is Sacs v. R.J. Reynolds, 2015-CA-025339.
Gould, an Emmy Award-winning CBS cameraman born in 1922, smoked for more than 50 years and frequently smoked Reynolds cigarettes before retiring to Florida in the 1980s. His family argued that Reynolds engineered cigarettes to increase addiction and cancer risk while concealing the dangers of smoking from consumers for decades.
During closing arguments, attorney Carlos Salazar told jurors the case was not simply about cigarettes being dangerous. “Just because cigarettes are dangerous doesn’t mean they’re defective,” Salazar argued. “They’re defective in terms of what R.J. Reynolds did to make them more dangerous.”
According to plaintiffs, Reynolds manipulated nicotine delivery and cigarette inhalability to maximize addiction, while internally acknowledging the health consequences of smoking.
Reynolds countered that cigarette risks had been widely known for decades and that Gould made an informed decision to continue smoking despite repeated warnings. “He was resolute,” defense attorney Kathryn Lehman of King & Spalding told jurors. “That was the decision that he made throughout his life.”
The case stood apart from most Florida tobacco litigation because it was not part of the long-running Engle progeny litigation. Under Engle litigation, many findings against cigarette manufacturers—including issues involving defective design and concealment—were already established through an earlier class action before the Florida Supreme Court decertified it.
That framework has historically given plaintiffs procedural advantages in thousands of follow-on tobacco suits filed throughout Florida. But in Gould’s case, jurors had to independently evaluate whether Reynolds cigarettes were defectively designed and whether they caused his cancer.
The verdict adds to a growing body of mixed outcomes in post-Engle tobacco litigation, where cigarette companies continue to aggressively defend claims despite decades of litigation and billions paid in settlements and verdicts.
