What did she know, and when did she know it?

I saw this yesterday but George Neumayr over at the Prowler does it better than Fox. This isn’t a Fisking; I agree completely with Neumayr, I’m just commenting interlinearly.

Twenty-eight billion dollars is quite a penalty for selling someone a product that they demanded. Bullock enjoyed the pleasures of smoking for decades, played dumb to its obvious dangers and risks, didn’t listen to her daughter and doctors who told her to quit, and then, upon getting sick, decided to sue the source of her pleasure.

Exactly. I don’t see how you could have been a smoker for the past 40 years and NOT KNOWN that THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT SMOKING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. I knew this when I was six and reading my Dad’s Camel cigarette packs (non-filtered). Dad knew it, too, and he smoked a lot more years than this stupid woman, so you just can’t tell me that she didn’t know.

Consistency and minimal personal honor are clearly not requirements for plaintiffs, still less for Los Angeles juries. Before heading off to lunch with Bullock’s attorney, jurors explained their Solomonic reasoning to the press. “It’s just a year’s revenue for Philip Morris,” juror Jose Farinas said casually.

Fine that man a year’s pay for being an asshole on the job.

According to the Los Angeles Times, jurors “had a spirited debate over the amount of the award, with individual jurors suggesting awards ranging from $5 million to $100 billion.”
How did they end up with $28 billion? The Times said they settled on that number because “jurors had been told that only 1 in 28,000 lung cancer victims gets his or her day in court, and the panel in effect decided to impose $1 million of punishment on Philip Morris for each of the 28,000.”

So in other words, they made it up as they went along.

The jury had been instructed that the amount of damages should “bear a reasonable relationship to the injury suffered.” But egged on by [Bullock’s lawyer Michael] Piuze, they ignored that instruction.

And they should all be fined for disregarding the judge’s instructions, barred from ever serving on a jury again (or running for elective office, either, for that matter) and the verdict should be thrown out as a result.
[Update: When I originally typed this, I was so mad I typed “ATTORNEY GENERAL” instead of “SURGEON GENERAL” without realizing it. Mea culpa. I fixed it.]