Philip Morris Usa V. Williams

In Philip Morris USA v. Williams, 127 S. Ct. 1057 (2007), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution's Due Process Clause does not permit a jury to base a large punitive damages award in part upon its desire to punish the defendant for harming persons who are not before the court (e.g., victims whom the parties do not represent). The Court held that such an award would amount to a taking of "property" from the defendant without due process.

This case concerned the appeal of a state court judgment to "a heavy cigarette smoker" for compensatory damages of about $821,000 (about $21,000 economic and $800,000 noneconomic) along with $79.5 million in punitive damages, nearly a 100:1 ration of punitive to compensatory damages. The trial judge subsequently found the $79.5 million punitive damages award "excessive,"^[1] and reduced it to $32 million. But when both sides appealed, the Oregon Court of Appeals rejected Philip Morris' arguments and restored the $79.5 million jury award. When Philip Morris sought review in the Oregon Supreme Court, it refused to hear the case, and the U.S. Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of granting review from an intermediate appellate state court.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the opinion for the 5-4 Court, with an unusually liberal-conservative coalition of Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in dissent.

Only Justice Stevens, writing for only himself in dissent, mentioned the Excessive Fines Clause:

The Court's holding in Browning-Ferris Industries of Vt., Inc. v. Kelco Disposal, Inc., 492 U.S. 257, 109 S. Ct. 2909, 106 L. Ed. 2d 219 (1989), distinguished, for the purposes of appellate review under the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment, between criminal sanctions and civil fines awarded entirely to the plaintiff. The fact that part of the award in this case is payable to the State lends further support to my conclusion that it should be treated as the functional equivalent of a criminal sanction. See id., at 263-264, 109 S. Ct. 2909, 106 L. Ed. 2d 219. I continue to agree with Justice O'Connor and those scholars who have concluded that the Excessive Fines Clause is applicable to punitive damages awards regardless of who receives the ultimate payout. See id., at 286-299, 109 S. Ct. 2909, 106 L. Ed. 2d 219 (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).

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