Lloyd A. Karmeier
SPRINGFIELD — The nation’s top court has declined to hear claims that Illinois Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier was biased against lawyers trying to resuscitate a $10.1 billion cigarette verdict.
In an order this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal by plaintiffs’ lawyers who argued Karmeier made “pejorative public statements” about their cause during his 2014 retention race.
The court did not explain its rationale. But the implications of its decision are easier to see.
More than Fifteen years after the case began against tobacco giant Philip Morris and more than a decade after Karmeier and the Illinois Supreme Court tossed it aside the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court may have finally extinguished one of the largest civil judgments in U.S. history.
“Today’s action by the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ends this case once and for all,” said Murray Garnick, associate general counsel for Philip Morris’ parent company, Altria, in a statement. “Almost 10 years ago this case was dismissed against Philip Morris USA, and, after countless hearings, motions and legal maneuvers by the plaintiffs to reinstate judgment, the outcome remains the same.”
In a statement this afternoon, Stephen M. Tillery, senior partner at Korein, Tillery LLC in St. Louis who helped represent the plaintiffs, noted the case was the first class action suit against “Marlboro Lights,” cigarettes designed specifically to give health assurance to smokers. He said the case broke ground by helping reveal that such cigarettes were actually more dangerous than others.
“Losing any case after 17 years of intense litigation is obviously disappointing. But all of us who represented the plaintiffs in Price feel that the case was socially significant and brought into public view facts that needed to be revealed,” he said. “If just one smoker quit as a result of the Price case, our efforts were clearly justified.”
The case is rife with political and legal intrigue. The original verdict would have netted about $1.77 billion in fees for the plaintiffs, who argued for a class of more than 1 million cigarette consumers who purchased them in Illinois between 1971 and 2001. Their original claim was that Philip Morris duped them into thinking “light” and “low-tar” cigarettes were not as dangerous as other types.
Illinois’ top court reversed the award in 2005, with Karmeier — just elected to the Supreme Court in what was then the most expensive judicial race in the nation — writing that the plaintiffs did not prove they were harmed.
The case ultimately worked its way back to the high court after the plaintiffs argued that the Federal Trade Commission in another case admitted it never authorized the “light” and “low-tar” descriptors.
Citing donations the company and associated law firms gave to Karmeier in 2004, the plaintiffs asked the justice to recuse himself in the case. But in a rare filing before his retention, Karmeier explained why he wouldn’t honor that request, saying among other things that the donations were a small fraction of the total he raised.
He also wrote that in a system in which judges are elected, “it is inevitable (and entirely appropriate) that interest groups will support judges whose judicial philosophies they believe are most closely aligned with their own views.”
Karmeier barely avoided becoming the first Illinois high court justice to lose a retention race. The close call was perhaps the result of Tillery and others associated with the tobacco case spending more than $2 million on a campaign to defeat him.
A year later, Karmeier joined a majority decision that said the plaintiffs in the tobacco appeal used the wrong procedure to reinstate their case. But when they tried a few months later to use the method the court prescribed, they were again denied.
Appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year, the plaintiffs dialed in on a new argument — that Karmeier violated their due process rights during his election when he told a newspaper that large lawyers’ fees were “distorting the system.”
One story paraphrased him as saying plaintiffs’ lawyers “stood to gain financially if he were ousted from the bench” and another quoted him as saying his victory could be “a signal that people should not try to manipulate the system for their own financial gain.” Given those statements, the plaintiffs argued, it was reasonable to believe that Karmeier prejudged the case against them.
But Philip Morris argued those claims, and the claims about who bankrolled Karmeier’s election, were “sheer fiction.” The company said Karmeier was simply pointing out the obvious in the newspaper report — that the plaintiffs’ lawyers had billions on the line and they had spent millions against him in the “transparent hope of ousting one of only two justices still on the Illinois Supreme Court who had voted against them in 2005.”
The plaintiffs had also asked the nation’s top justices to keep their claims handy until the high court weighed in on another case about judge recusals, Williams v. Pennsylvania. But the Supreme Court earlier this month limited that decision to cases in which judges earlier had “significant, personal involvement” as prosecutors.
The case is Sharon Price, et al. v. Philip Morris, No. 15–947.