Florida jury also found Stuart Hess bore 58% of the blame for the damage to his health

This article is more than 11 years old

This article is more than 11 years old

A chain smoker who died of lung cancer is more to blame for his habit than tobacco companies, but Philip Morris should pay $8m (£5.6m) to the man's widow and son for concealling the dangers of cigarettes, a Broward county, Florida jury ordered yesterday in a landmark case.

Its ruling in the lawsuit brought by Elaine Hess of Cooper City could foreshadow the outcome of 8,000 similar suits waiting to be tried across Florida. If so, anti-smoking advocates said they would be delighted to see Big Tobacco held accountable time and again for its negligence.

"This jury was able to look at the full picture, which includes really the reprehensible misconduct by the tobacco companies," said Edward L Sweda Jr, senior attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University law school in Boston.

"What they clearly did was reject Philip Morris' blame-the-smoker-for-smoking defence. Certainly this is an encouraging event today and certainly a good sign for the cases to come."

The jury rejected Elaine Hess' demand for more than $130m and found her husband, Stuart Hess, bore 58% of the blame for the damage he did to his health.

Stuart Hess, a chain smoker of up to three packs a day, died in 1997 at age 55.

Elaine Hess, and son, David, sued Philip Morris, makers of the Benson & Hedges cigarettes that Stuart Hess puffed on for more than 40 years, saying he bought into the company's decades of deceit, downplaying health risks to promote sales of their deadly products.

The case was never about the money, widow Elaine Hess, 63, said.

"Nothing can make up for the loss," she said.

Richmond, Virginia-based Philip Morris USA has vowed to appeal the verdict.

This is the first of about 8,000 individual lawsuits to go to trial since the Florida supreme court in 2006 threw out a record $145bn class-action jury award.

Though the court tossed out the award, it upheld the jury's conclusions that tobacco companies misrepresented the addictive nature and concealed the health dangers of cigarettes.

Cigarette makers, lawyers and other Florida smokers and survivors who have filed similar suits eyed the Hess case as an indicator as to how other cases might turn out.

However, Philip Morris said other cases might be unlikely to prevail with jurors.

"We do not believe today's verdict is predictive of outcomes in future cases," Murray Garnick, vice-president and associate general counsel for Altria Client Services said on behalf of Philip Morris in a statement yesterday.

"This case was selected by plantiffs' lawyers from among thousands of others to be the first tried presumably because they believed it was their best case."