The plaintiffs in Hess v. Philip Morris, which we blogged about last week, have asked the jury to award $30 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages.

As readers of this blog know, punitive damages awards of that size rarely survive appeal. But it’s possible that the plaintiffs are asking for such a large number because they know, as the Cal Biz Lit blog has pointed out, that statistical studies show that a large request for punitive damages is the most significant predictor of a large punitive damages award. So the plaintiffs may not get $100 million, but they’ll get more than they would have gotten if they had asked for something less.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell has dramatically reduced a jury’s punitive damages award in a lawsuit between two rival insurance companies. The jury awarded $63 million in punitive damages but Judge Campbell, in response to the defendant’s post-trial motions, reduced the punitive damages to $3.6 million, equal to the amount of the jury’s award of compensatory damages.

As we have observed, a greater number of courts have been limiting punitive damages to a one-to-one ratio recently, at least in cases involving substantial compensatory damages awards. I have written a short paper on this topic which will be published by the Washington Legal Foundation later this month.

The Associated Press is reporting that a Florida jury ruled in favor of plaintiff Elaine Hess in the first phase of the first trial in a series of cases brought by 8,000 Florida smokers. The jury ruled that the plaintiff’s husband, Stuart Hess, a longtime chain smoker, was addicted to nicotine before he died of lung cancer. The trial will now consider the issues of liability and, if necessary, damages.

As we noted here, these cases are the result of the failed Engle class action, in which Florida smokers collectively obtained an award of $145 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil award in U.S. history. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court overturned that award, ruling that the plaintiffs had to prove individually that cigarettes caused their illnesses.

Hat tip: How Appealing

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a Georgia jury has awarded $250,000 in compensatory damages and $2 million in punitive damages against Vesta Strategies, a now defunct California investment company. According to the plaintiff’s lawyers, Vesta defrauded victims nationwide and the FBI has opened an investigation.

If other plaintiffs come forward seeking punitive damages, this litigation could raise some interesting questions. Will the court in the next case take the first punitive damages award into account when deciding whether further punitive damages are appropriate? Will this become a race between plaintiffs, competing to see who can get a punitive damages award and enforce it before the company’s assets are gone, leaving subsequent plaintiffs unable to recover their actual losses? Many law review articles have been written about the problems presented by punitive damages claims for mass torts, but the courts have yet to devise any workable solution.

The National Law Journal reports that the plaintiffs who filed the first lawsuit against the Peanut Corporation of America in connection with the recent salmonella outbreak have added a claim for punitive damages to their lawsuit.

The punitive damages claim is apparently based on a recent FDA report, which indicated that PCA shipped products that had tested positive for salmonella contamination at least 12 times in the past two years, and that federal investigators found unsanitary conditions and numerous health violations at the plant. According to the plaintiffs, the FDA report shows that PCA knew they were shipping products that were likely to be contaminated.

Last September we blogged about a San Diego jury that awarded $15.2 million in compensatory damages and $40.4 million in punitive damages against San Diego Gas & Electric Company in case involving a helicopter crash that killed four Marines. The trial court in that case, after hearing post-trial motions, has reduced the punitive damages down to $8.5 million, but has otherwise left the verdict intact.

As reported by the San Diego Union Tribune, the crash occurred when the Marines’ helicopter hit a utility tower located on Camp Pendleton during a nighttime training exercise. The plaintiffs blamed SDG&E for not installing safety lights on the tower. SDG&E argued that they complied with the Marine Corps’ request to light certain towers on Camp Pendleton, but the Marine Corps never asked SDG&E to light the tower in question, which had been in place for 25 years.

The trial court, in its posttrial order, found sufficient evidence to support the award of punitive damages, but found that that SDG&E’s conduct did not warrant a $40.4 million penalty.

Unfortunately, we can’t provide much commentary or analysis, because the litigation is ongoing and our firm represents SDG&E in this matter.

Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California issued an order yesterday denying the NFL Player’s Association’s post-trial motions in a case in which a jury awarded $7.1 million in compensatory damages and $21 million in punitive damages. The plaintiffs in this case are retired players who alleged that the union failed to properly market their images, and that the union cut them out of licensing deals so that active players could receive bigger royalty payments. The Players Association says it will appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

Hat tip: Retired Players.org

Margaret Cronin Fisk has a story on Bloomberg.com entitled Billion-Dollar U.S. Verdicts Vanish After Appeals, New Rulings, reporting on data compiled by Bloomberg about the largest civil jury verdicts in the U.S. in 2008. The story reports, among other things, that no jury verdicts topped $1 billion in 2008. That makes two of the last three years with no billion-plus verdicts.

More directly relevant to this blog, the top ten punitive awards in 2008 totaled $960 million, which is nothing to sneeze at, but still down 30 percent from 2007 and 63 percent from 2006. If this trend continues, perhaps we will look back on 2006 as the zenith (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of the megabucks punitive damages award.

The Barre Montpelier Times Argus is reporting that a jury was awarded $192,500 in compensatory damages and $3.4 million in punitive damages to a plaintiff who was molested by a priest in 1977, when the plaintiff was an 11-year-old altar boy. That’s a ratio of nearly 18-to-1. If ever there were a case in which the extremely despicable nature of the conduct justifies a ratio beyond the single-digit range, this appears to be it. This is the second major punitive damages award of the year against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Vermont, which is appealing a $8.7 million verdict awarded in May. The same priest was involved in both cases, and is involved in 19 more pending cases. According to the Argus story, the diocese has dismissed the priest from the diocese but has not stripped him of his priesthood.