Judge issued landmark ruling against the tobacco industry
Gladys Kessler, a federal judge who issued a landmark ruling against the tobacco industry in 2006 — finding that cigarette makers had violated civil racketeering laws by conspiring for decades to deceive the public about the deadly threat posed by smoking — died March 16 at a hospital in Washington. She was 85.
She had complications from pneumonia, said her stepdaughter Sally Mackwell Bauer.
Judge Kessler, a former public-interest lawyer who served for 17 years on the D.C. Superior Court, was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
She handled cases involving detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the administration of the Medicaid program and environmental protection legislation.
But she rose to greatest prominence as the judge who presided over United States of America v. Philip Morris USA et al., a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department in 1999 against leading U.S. cigarette makers.
The federal case — which followed a $206 billion settlement between the tobacco industry and 46 states — was one of the largest civil lawsuits in American history, with litigation so lengthy that it outlasted Judge Kessler’s tenure on the bench.
Although the case was transferred years ago to another judge and although an appeals court muted the immediate impact of her ruling, she remained the jurist at the center of the case, celebrated among anti-tobacco activists for a ruling that represented one of the most significant moral victories in their cause.
Her 2006 decision — befitting the sprawling nature of the case — ran 1,652 pages. She detailed the ways in which tobacco companies had deliberately misled the public about the addictive nature of cigarettes and the health consequences of smoking.
“In short,” she wrote, they “have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.”
Because of an earlier ruling by an appeals court, Judge Kessler, who was the sole fact-finder in the case, was unable to order the surrender — in legal parlance, the “disgorgement” — of billions of dollars in profits earned by the tobacco companies through what she had found to be their deceptive business practices.
She did, however, order the companies to undertake, at a cost of millions of dollars, a campaign of “corrective statements” in the national media on the health consequences of smoking. She ordered that cigarette makers stop marketing products as “low tar” or “light” or “mild” — terms historically used for products that, as she wrote, “offer no clear health benefit over regular cigarettes.”