Can Philip Morris blame smokers for addiction? Hawaii high court weighs in

Hawaii Supreme Court justices wrestled with whether Philip Morris can slash a lung cancer survivor’s damage by blaming her for becoming addicted to cigarettes the company was found to have deceptively marketed.

by Jeremy Yurow, Court House News,  May 14, 2026

HONOLULU (CN) — A Hawaii smoker who convinced a jury that Philip Morris helped deceive the public about the dangers of cigarettes urged the state’s highest court Thursday to stop the tobacco giant from cutting millions of dollars from her damages award by blaming her for becoming addicted.

Ramona Ricapor-Hall sued Philip Morris and other tobacco companies after developing lung cancer, accusing the industry of concealing smoking risks and misleading consumers for decades. A jury found Philip Morris liable for negligence, strict liability and conspiracy, awarding her $6 million in compensatory damages and $8 million in punitive damages.

But the jury also found Ricapor-Hall partly responsible for her illness, assigning 54% of the fault to Philip Morris and 46% to her. The trial court used that split to reduce her compensatory damages by nearly half, stripping away roughly $3 million of her award. Both sides appealed.

Chief Justice Vladimir Devens and Associate Justices Sabrina McKenna, Todd Eddins and Lisa Ginoza heard the case alongside First Circuit Judge Jordon Kimura, who joined the five-member panel due to a court vacancy.

Philip Morris, represented by attorney Scott Chesin, spent most of the argument urging the court to throw out the verdict entirely and order a new trial, pointing to what it called a series of errors by the trial judge in handling a jury exposed to outside information.

Ricapor-Hall, represented by attorney David Sales, argued that even if the verdict stands, the damages reduction should be reversed because Hawaii law does not allow a defendant’s intentional fraud to be weighed against a plaintiff’s negligence to reduce what the defendant owes.

The issue arose when a juror told the court she had gone online and discovered something so troubling that it had, in her words, colored her view of the entire case and left her unable to remain impartial. She was removed from the jury.

Chesin told the justices the trial judge then compounded the problem in two ways: by substituting alternate jurors into the deliberating panel twice, in violation of court rules, and by failing to conduct a sufficiently detailed inquiry into what the remaining jurors may have heard.

“As soon as the judge learned that a juror had been deliberating for two full days after learning of facts that had been consciously kept from that jury for fear that they would be prejudicial, this court’s case law required him to conduct a searching inquiry,” Chesin said.

The information the juror found, Chesin said, related to a massive settlement Philip Morris and other tobacco companies reached with attorneys general from 46 states, paying billions of dollars to resolve claims of widespread misconduct. The judge had kept that settlement out of the trial’s first phase because of the risk it would unfairly influence the jury before it had heard all the evidence.

Devens pointed out that the trial judge had asked the remaining jurors whether they could still be fair and impartial, and they all said yes. Chesin responded that the question was too vague to reveal what the jurors had actually heard.

“A yes answer to that question can mean I didn’t hear anything. It can mean I heard something but it was trivial. It can mean I heard something monumental but I can set it aside,” he said.

Eddins questioned whether Philip Morris had missed its own chance to get answers. Chesin disputed that characterization, saying his co-counsel repeatedly urged the judge to ask jurors directly what they had heard and what effect it had on deliberations.

Sales said Philip Morris had no one to blame but itself. The removed juror’s statements were too vague to require further inquiry by the trial court, he said, and the company had squandered its chance to develop a clearer record by declining to question her directly when it had the opportunity.

“At most,” Sales said, the removed juror’s comments amounted to an utterance of unknown content, and it remained unclear whether any other juror had heard anything about the settlement.

On the question of damages, Sales said Hawaii law has long barred defendants from reducing liability for intentional misconduct by pointing to a plaintiff’s negligence and that the overwhelming majority of American courts take the same view.

“The industry’s conduct in luring young people to smoke, lying about the harmfulness of smoking, creating illusions that people could smoke without fear are not properly comparable to Ricapor-Hall’s smoking, or continued smoking once she became addicted,” Sales said. “And that is exactly what the conspirators wanted her to do.”

Sales told the justices the reduction stripped roughly $3 million from Ricapor-Hall’s compensatory award.

Ricapor-Hall had to prove her fraud conspiracy claim by clear and convincing evidence, while the jury’s finding that she was 46% at fault was governed by the lower preponderance standard. Sales said it was unfair to use a finding reached under a lesser burden of proof to reduce damages won under a stricter one.

The argument prompted McKenna to test Philip Morris’ position with a hypothetical, asking where the court should draw the line and whether a domestic violence victim who sued her abuser could have her damages reduced because she failed to leave when she had the chance.

Chesin said he would draw no categorical line at all, arguing juries should generally be trusted to apportion fault and that Hawaii case law supports allowing such comparisons. He said punitive damages already address especially egregious conduct.

“Are you going to require the defendant to pay for damages that the jury found the defendant didn’t cause?” he said.

The court took the matter under advisement.