WASHINGTON  A challenge to a $79.5 million punitive damages award against Philip Morris USA ended with a whimper on Tuesday when the Supreme Court announced that it should not have agreed to hear the case after all.

The case, brought by the widow of a heavy smoker, was before the court for the third time. The question this time was, in essence, whether the Oregon Supreme Court had acted with lawless impudence in refusing to follow the United States Supreme Court’s instructions in an earlier decision in the case.

In 2007, in its second ruling in the case, the United State Supreme Court said that jurors might have impermissibly calculated the damages against Philip Morris at the trial in 1999.

The jury instructions allowed for the possibility of awarding damages based in part on harm to other, unnamed smokers in addition to Jesse D. Williams, the man whose widow, Mayola Williams, brought the lawsuit.