"(The) death tax is about the reddest-meat tax topic that you can find in the small-business and entrepreneurial community."
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[ WASHINGTON REPORT ]
Lead Department of Justice tobacco lawyer
quits with outcome of DOJ lawsuit pending
The lead trial lawyer in the government’s landmark lawsuit against the tobacco industry (TR, December 2005) quit the case in December and left the Justice Department, a move that came when the companies and the department were still negotiating a settlement.
Sharon Eubanks, who had pursued the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, withdrew on Dec. 1, the government said in a filing in U.S. District Court, as reported by The Associated Press.
Eubanks said her supervisors’ failure to support her work on the tobacco case influenced her decision to retire after 22 years with the department.
Her withdrawal followed a stunning reversal in June in which the Justice Department disregarded the recommendations of its own witness, Dr. Michael Fiore, and reduced the amount it was demanding from the tobacco industry for smoking-cessation programs to $10 billion. Fiore had proposed $130 billion.
“The political appointees to whom I report made this an easy decision,” Eubanks told The Washington Post. She said her work on the tobacco case had been professionally rewarding, but her politically appointed bosses “have been somewhat less than supportive of the team’s efforts.”
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the Justice Department’s request for $10 billion was made on the merits of the case, independent of political considerations.
It is “such a tragedy that the Justice Department backed away from their original cessation remedy,” Fiore recently wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. “Can you imagine what would happen if, as we projected with this plan, one million additional smokers quit each year (and) 33 million over time?”
In August, the Justice Department used Fiore’s name 45 times in a post-trial brief to bolster its arguments against the cigarette companies, despite having disregarded the amount he had recommended the industry should pay.
“Dr. Fiore is simply the world’s foremost expert on the treatment of tobacco dependence and the population-wide delivery of smoking cessation services,” the Justice Department said.
The case, which went to trial in May 2004, had the potential to be the leaping-off point for what could have been one of the most devastating chain of events to ever hit the tobacco industry. At that time, the DOJ, in U.S. District Court, was given the green light by Judge Gladys Kessler to proceed with its $280-billion lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The DOJ said the potential $280-billion award, or “disgorgement,” coincided with the amount of “ill-gotten gains” earned by the industry over the previous 40 years.
However, last February the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in a 2-1 decision that disgorgement was not an appropriate remedy for the DOJ case against the industry, a “major win” for the industry that essentially removed the financial risk to the defendants.
Since then, the two sides have been haggling on how much, if any, tobacco companies should pay for nationwide smoking-cessation programs, with estimates ranging from $10 billion to $130 billion over an undetermined period of time ranging from five to 25 years.
The defendants in the lawsuit are Philip Morris USA Inc. and its parent, Altria Group Inc.; R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.; Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.; British American Tobacco Ltd.; Lorillard Tobacco Co.; Liggett Group Inc.; Counsel for Tobacco Research-U.S.A.; and the Tobacco Institute. |
