text: In an age when big-ticket trials are a rarity, plaintiffs lawyers and Big Tobacco continue to battle ferociously in courts across the Sunshine State. 
   
   More than 7,000 lawsuits claiming injuries and death due to smoking are pending in state and federal courts in Florida, the legacy of the state Supreme Court’s 2006 “Engle” ruling, which required jurors in future smoking cases to be bound by certain factual findings, including that tobacco companies sold cigarettes that were “defective” and “unreasonably dangerous.” (Here’s a previous LB post on the litigation.) 
   
   The supreme court ruling has given smoking plaintiffs in Florida a huge leg up; they have so far amassed more than $250 million in damages in so-called Engle progeny cases. 
   
   The latest news comes out of Bronson, Florida (pop. 1,049), where a jury yesterday awarded $80 million — $72M of which was in punitive damages — to the daughter of James Cayce Horner, a two-pack a day smoker who died in 1996 of lung cancer. 
   
   The jury found that Horner was was 10% responsible for his death and that the defendant, R.J. Reynolds, was 90% at fault. 
   
   “People need to be reminded, again and again, of the true cost—in precious human life—that R.J. Reynolds has imposed and continues to impose on our society,” plaintiffs’ counsel David Sales said in a statement. 
   
   An attorney for R.J. Reynolds declined to comment. 
   
   The Horner verdict reverses a recent winning streak for the tobacco industry. They had won defense verdicts in eight straight Engle cases, the most recent on Friday, when a Miami jury decided in favor of Philip Morris USA in a smoking trial. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
target: – The daughter of a man who died of lung cancer after smoking for 60 years has been awarded $80 million by a Florida jury. The jury decided that tobacco giant RJ Reynolds was 90% responsible for the man's death at the age of 76, and ordered the company to pay $8 million in compensatory damages and $72 million in punitive damages, BusinessWeek reports. The woman's lawyer expects the appeals process to last up to 3 years if the company appeals to Florida's Supreme Court, which he fully expects it to do. "Tobacco always appeals," he said. More than 7,000 smoking-related lawsuits are pending in Florida, and the verdict against RJ Reynolds marks the end of an 8-case winning streak for the tobacco industry, the Wall Street Journal notes.