LAWSUIT: His lawyers say Philip Morris Inc. knew its product was dangerous and addictive.
11:32 PM PST on Monday, March 7, 2005
By JOHN WELSH / The Press-Enterprise
A 51-year-old Moreno Valley man should have known the dangers of cigarettes while he was a smoker, an attorney for Philip Morris Inc. said Monday in a downtown Riverside courtroom.
One reason is that the man's religious elders warned him smoking is harmful to the body, a human temple, said Walter Cofer, a lead counsel for the tobacco giant.
Former truck driver Bruce Coolidge is suing Philip Morris Inc. for ruining his health. The civil case reflects similar ones that have had mixed results -- some failedbut others resulted in judgments as much as $145 million. It marks the Inland region's first trial of its kind.
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At issue is whether the company is responsible for Coolidge's lung cancer and should pay for it. The Coolidge case does not set a dollar amount in damages.
On Monday, Coolidge used a motorized wheelchair as he entered the Riverside County Superior courtroom for opening statements in the liability phase of the trial. Coolidge declined comment during a lunch recess on advice of his attorneys.
He testified during an earlier phase in the trial when jurors agreed his case should move forward, deciding against Philip Morris' attorneys' statute-of-limitations contentions. Philip Morris argued Coolidge suffered health problems long before the suit was filed in July 2001.
On Monday, one of Coolidge's attorneys placed old Philip Morris in-house memos on an overhead screen and read portions of the memos, some dating to the mid-1950s that addressed company executives' views about cigarettes' addictiveness. The attorney, Shawn Khorrami of Van Nuys, highlighted certain paragraphs in an effort to show executives knew how harmful their product was to consumers such as his client
If study results show nicotine addiction is on the same levels as caffeine and morphine, "we will want to bury it," Khorrami read from one of the memos.
Khorrami discussed free will versus informed choice and told jurors Philip Morris researchers knew nicotine was addictive and addictions take away an individual's informed decisions.
"If that were to get out, the whole free-will defense would go away," Khorrami said.
Cofer asked jurors what such dated memos have to do with Coolidge's case.
The Kansas City attorney also reminded them Congress forced companies such as Philip Morris to put warning labels on its packets. Some of those labels date to 1966 -- about the time a pre-teen Bruce Coolidge tried cigarettes for the first time while hanging outside a liquor store in his Torrance neighborhood.
"We all know what happened," Cofer said of the young Coolidge's first puff. "He started to cough. He started to gag. He started to get nauseous."
Even then, he knew they were bad for him -- and that's one reason why he didn't smoke in front of his parents, Cofer said.
Later on, an adult Coolidge should have known about cigarettes' harm because new warning labels landed on packets in the mid-1980s.
Cofer placed a desktop-sized foam board on a stand that showed some of the earlier Surgeon General's warnings, including: "Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health."
Coolidge knew when he was baptized as a Jehovah's Witness in the late 1970s, he couldn't smoke because it is forbidden among its faithful, Cofer said.
"It is believed the body is a temple of God and smoking is not allowed because smoking can be addictive and can harm the body," he said.
"Mr. Coolidge understood that. He could be a smoker or he could be a Jehovah's Witness."
His smoking led to elders dismissing him from the church, Cofer said.
The trial resumes today in Judge Roger Luebs' Riverside courtroom.