A gay man has been awarded a whopping $157 million in a wrongful death lawsuit after his husband died of lung cancer related to smoking, NBC News reports.
Tobacco companies R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris were ordered by a Broward County jury to pay Bryan Rintoul, the spouse of the late Edward Caprio, $157.4 million, and $9 million in compensatory damages on top of that. They had to pay because the deceased smoked cigarettes from the two companies ever since he was a teen.
According to NBC News, the jury "blamed the tobacco companies for manipulating the addictive nicotine levels in cigarettes and marketing them to adolescents." Caprio was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 1996 and finally succumbed to the disease in 2018.
"This is the largest award in a tobacco case in the last five or so years, and it is the only time that a same-sex couple has pursued a wrongful death case against this industry in Florida or anywhere in this country," Jonathan Gdanski, a lawyer representing Rintoul, said. "For that matter, I am not familiar with any other same-sex wrongful death verdict of any type."
That last sentence explains why the award is notable. It is the first case of its kind in Florida that involves a same-sex married couple.
