Flawed jury instruction leads Oregon Supreme Court to affirm punitive damages

The 10-year saga of Williams v. Philip Morris, Inc. yields this lesson for Oregon litigators:  keep your jury instructions short.  After remand of the cigarette products liability case by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Oregon Supreme Court last Thursday rejected a jury instruction proposed by Philip Morris, and on that basis affirmed a $79.5 million punitive damages award.  While the lengthy jury instruction may have accurately stated federal law on punitive damages, it misstated Oregon law.

Last year the U.S. Supreme Court, applying federal Due Process law on punitives, issued an opinion signaling that the jury instruction should not have been rejected by the trial court.  But the Oregon Supreme Court has now found that a different section of the three-and-a-half page jury instruction did not accurately recite Oregon's punitive damages law.  Because a jury instruction can be rejected if any part of it is invalid, the trial court did not err in refusing the Philip Morris instruction.  According to Justice Michael Gillette, "asking the court to give a multiple-page instruction . . . involves a significant danger that the proffered instruction will be erroneous in some aspects."  If the instruction had recited only federal law, the Oregon Supreme Court may have found error in refusing to give the instruction, resulting in reversal of the judgment.

See our earlier coverage of the case here.