Legal News

Law Blog Obituary: Tobacco Plaintiff Howard Engle

By Ashby Jones

The lead plaintiff in a pioneering class-action brought against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, Dr. Howard Engle, died on Wednesday. He was 89. Click here for the NYT’s obituary. The cause was reportedly “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”

The Times’s obit is a good, quick read. For starters, in about a paragraph, the story recaps the convoluted roller-coaster that Engle’s huge class-action turned into over time. The suit, which argued that the tobacco industry knowingly addicted smokers and failed to adequately warn them of the dangers of continuing to smoke:

went to trial in 1998, and in 2000, the plaintiffs were awarded $145 billion in punitive damages, the largest punitive damage award ever decided on by a jury. But an appeals court voided the award, saying that it was excessive and that the cases of individual smokers were too disparate to be considered as a class. The plaintiffs petitioned the Florida Supreme Court, which upheld the decertification of the class but permitted individuals to bring suit. Thousands did. Those cases, known as Engle progeny, are only now beginning to be decided.

From $145 billion to nothing: a precipitous drop indeed. Still, Engle “received a six-figure settlement from a guaranteed fund provided by the tobacco companies.”

Engle had smoked packs (plural) of cigarettes every day since college. While he tried many times to quit, he was never successful. A Wisconsin native, Engle practiced medicine mostly in Miami Beach, Fla., where his specialty was pediatric neurology.

Among Engle's patients were the nine children of Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, medical- malpractice lawyers. But in 1991, they brought a class-action suit against tobacco companies on behalf of flight attendants who said they were harmed by secondhand smoke. Mr. Rosenblatt said that Engle became interested in the flight attendants' case, and that when the second class-action suit came along, they discussed that as well. Partly out of a desire to publicize the addictive nature of smoking, Engle agreed to become the lead plaintiff.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 24, 2009 (boomark / email).