Hawaii high court restores smoker's $2 million award against Philip Morris

Hawaii's Supreme Court said a plaintiff's own negligence can't reduce damages for a defendant's intentional fraud.

by Jeremy Yurow, Court House News, August 7, 2026

HONOLULU (CN) — Ramona Ricapor-Hall started smoking cigarettes in 1953. She was twelve years old. Warning labels wouldn’t appear on cigarette packs for another thirteen years.

She kept smoking for sixty-six years, through a nicotine addiction that beat back every attempt she made to quit. In 2019, doctors diagnosed her with lung cancer.

A jury later found that Philip Morris helped keep her hooked, through decades of lies about what cigarettes could do to her body. On Thursday, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that a trial judge shouldn’t have let the tobacco company use her own carelessness to shrink what it owes her for that fraud.

“That was error,” Justice Todd Eddins wrote for the court. “We hold that a plaintiff’s negligence does not reduce damages for an intentional tort.”

The ruling restores $2.76 million that a state court had stripped from Ricapor-Hall’s jury award, and settles a question the state’s courts hadn’t answered before: whether a smoker’s own negligence can be weighed against a tobacco company’s deliberate fraud.

At trial, jurors found Philip Morris liable on every theory Ricapor-Hall pursued: negligence, strict products liability, and two counts of conspiracy to defraud. They awarded her $6 million in general damages and $8 million in punitive damages, while also assigning her 46% of the fault for her own injuries.

The lower court then cut her general damages by that same 46%, reasoning that Hawaii’s comparative negligence law applied across every claim, including the conspiracy counts.

Ricapor-Hall appealed that reduction. The Hawaii Supreme Court agreed with her, leaning on a century-old precedent that bars fraud defendants from using a victim’s carelessness as a shield.

“A party guilty of fraud can take no benefit from a victim’s carelessness” Eddins wrote.

Eddins traced that principle through decades of Hawaii law and found nothing in the state’s 1969 comparative negligence statute meant to disturb it. The statute, he wrote, governs actions for negligence and nothing more, leaving intentional torts like fraud outside its reach.

“Reducing intentional-tort damages by a plaintiff’s negligence entices defendants to target careless victims. They can cut the price of their misconduct by showing their mark acted without due care,” he wrote.

Philip Morris had also asked the court to overturn the verdict outright, on four separate grounds. Each one failed.

The company argued the lower court broke trial rules by recalling two alternate jurors after deliberations had already begun, after one juror stumbled onto outside information about the tobacco industry’s settlement with state governments and a second had to leave for a preplanned trip.

The court held that discharging an alternate doesn’t mean discharging them forever, and that nothing stopped the trial judge from calling them back and restarting deliberations from scratch.

Philip Morris also said the judge should have dug deeper into what the first juror, identified in court records only as Juror 30, told her fellow jurors before she was excused. The Supreme Court found Philip Morris had passed up four separate chances to help investigate that question at trial, and couldn’t now fault the record it had declined to help build.

The company’s remaining arguments, over two jury instructions and whether a 1998 nationwide tobacco settlement barred punitive damages, fared no better.

On the punitive damages question, the court noted that Philip Morris’s own trial lawyers had told jurors the case was not a referendum on smoking but had to be tied specifically to Ricapor-Hall, undercutting the company’s later claim that her damages duplicated the state’s earlier settlement.

The case now returns to the Oahu’s First Circuit Court, where a judge must enter an amended judgment restoring Ricapor-Hall’s full $6 million in general damages, adjusted for whatever credit Philip Morris is owed from the other companies she’d already settled with before trial. Her $8 million punitive damages award stands untouched.

Representatives for Philip Morris and Ricapor-Hall did not immediately respond to requests for comment.