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By Michael Connor
MIAMI (Reuters) - Tobacco companies pledged no deals Monday as jury selection began in the first class action on behalf of sick smokers ever to come to trial and the first big courtroom test for cigarette makers since a national pact to end America's tobacco war fell apart.
An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 sick Floridians, some packing a downtown Miami courtroom where jury selection began, would share in any financial award from the suit accusing Philip Morris, Reynolds Tobacco and other cigarette makers of hiding the dangers of smoking and selling a hazardous product.
Jury selection was likely to last weeks, and no verdict was expected for months.
Last year, after months of legal battle in the same court before the same judge against the same husband-and-wife team of anti-tobacco lawyers, the industry struck a $350 million deal to end another pioneering class-action suit -- one brought by non-smoking flight attendants claiming injuries from secondhand smoke aboard U.S. passenger jets.
"That was a different time," Daniel Donohue, a spokesman for Reynolds Tobacco, told reporters at the Miami-Dade Courthouse. "That resolution came when there was a national settlement under discussion."
Donohue said no talks on a deal were underway between cigarette makers and Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, the lawyers pressing the class-action suit on behalf of sick Florida smokers or their survivors.
The suit -- Engle et al vs R J Reynolds et al -- claims that Dr. Howard Engle, a retired Miami Beach doctor ill with emphysema, and thousands of others contracted cancer and other diseases from smoking while the industry conspired for decades to hide tobacco's inherent dangers.
"I smoked and I believed I was lied to for years," said Frank Amadeo, a claimant from Orlando with throat cancer. "For years they said smoking was not addictive, and it was."
Initial filings in the case in 1994 demanded $200 billion or more in compensatory and punitive damages but Stanley Rosenblatt last week would only say that damages could total billions of dollars, if a jury of six finds against the defendants. In last year's secondhand-smoke class action, the Rosenblatts sought $5 billion damages and settled before a verdict for about $350 million.
The count of alleged victims is also uncertain, but the Rosenblatts have registered 13,000 to 14,000 claimants and estimate the total number at 100,000 to 200,000. Tobacco lawyers, who deny the suit's accusations, claim the number of people is too large for any one case to cover.
If tobacco companies should lose the current trial, two follow-up procedures would be needed, according to a plan hammered out among the opposing lawyers and trial judge.
One would determine tobacco's role in causing six specific diseases and the second would review each plaintiff's claim to determine tobacco's legal liability. Some legal experts speculate that Big Tobacco, if faced with literally hundreds of thousands of court proceedings, would strike a deal.
Questioning of potential jurors began in late morning, after court staff carried extra benches into Courtroom 6-1 to seat the hundreds of spectators and claimants.
Some claimants came to court with portable oxygen tanks and questioning went on amid steady coughing and wheezing.
The first potential juror, a smoker with a son employed by a law firm defending a tobacco company in the case, was excused.
Before juror questioning started, Judge Robert Kaye of Miami-Dade County Circuit Court rejected without comment a tobacco industry request that one of the defendants, Liggett, be separated from the other cigarette companies.
Liggett has been shunned by other tobacco companies since it began cooperating closely with state governments and anti-tobacco activists in the landmark court cases against the industry.
Another Florida jury, in Jacksonville, found last month against Brown & Williamson, a unit of B.A.T Industries Plc, on behalf of a sick smoker's family. The tobacco lawyers argued that the victim knew the dangers of smoking and had to assume responsibility for his decision to use cigarettes.
But, shortly afterwards, an appeals court in Florida dismissed another jury verdict in 1996 for $750,000 against Brown & Williamson, saying the case was filed too late.
The U.S. tobacco industry has settled several multi-billion dollar lawsuits brought by Florida and other states claiming losses for treating sick smokers in government health care programs.
But a proposed and much criticized $368 billion deal to end much tobacco litigation fell apart in Congress, leaving no immediate prospect for relief from the torrent of anti-tobacco litigation in the United States.
((-- Miami newsroom, miami.newsroom+reuters.com, 305-374-5013))
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