Judge Urged to Rule Tobacco Firms Broke Law
The Justice Department asked the judge who presided over a nine-month civil-racketeering trial of U.S. cigarette makers to find that they had conspired for five decades to mislead consumers about the risks of smoking.
Lawyers for the department, in a court filing Monday of about 2,500 pages, urged U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington to rule in their favor based on the evidence presented against Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA and other tobacco companies at the trial that ended in June.
Government lawyers said the defendants “engaged in a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the American public,” and their “past and ongoing conduct establishes a reasonable likelihood of future violations.” The Justice Department cited live testimony by 58 witnesses, recorded testimony by 120 others and more than 10,000 documents.
Kessler will consider the government’s filing, along with an opposing 2,500-page brief filed Monday by the cigarette makers, in determining whether the industry violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. The government has asked Kessler to order the companies to spend $14 billion to help smokers quit and to reduce youth smoking.
In its papers, the government claims that cigarette makers hatched a conspiracy in 1953 to counter mounting evidence linking smoking with lung cancer.
The companies worked together to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking, to suppress research into smoking and disease and to resist the development of safer cigarettes, the government claims.
“The government has repeatedly invoked the mantra of ‘improving public health’ in an extralegal attempt to justify a series of multibillion-dollar remedies -- including a national cessation program, a public education and counter-marketing campaign, and a youth smoking penalty,” the industry argued in its opposing brief. The government’s case “corrodes the judicial function and openly flouts RICO law,” it said.
The companies claim that the government failed to prove that they were likely to violate the law in the future, which Kessler said it must do to win the case. The cigarette makers no longer deny the link between smoking and disease and agree that cigarettes are addictive, they argued.
