CBS Evening News - 2000-07-15
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Read a transcript preview of “CBS Evening News - 2000-07-15” from malgent, uploaded on 2025-04-06.
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Language: English (YouTube automatic captions)
[0:02] Up in smoke in the wake of the huge
[0:05] tobacco damage award, doubts that it
[0:07] will stand up on appeal. Tobacco farmers
[0:10] rotating their crops in the face of the
[0:11] changing legal climate. Image problem
[0:14] for Philadelphia. Does one picture
[0:16] really tell the city's full story? And a
[0:19] television news milestone. Walter
[0:21] Kronite's golden onair anniversary.
[0:25] [Music]
[0:28] This is the CBS Evening
[0:31] News with Russ Mitchell.
[0:35] And good evening. The smoke has yet to
[0:37] clear and the fallout could go on for
[0:38] years from yesterday's record jury
[0:40] verdict in Florida. More than $145
[0:43] billion in damages against the cigarette
[0:45] industry. Lawyers are going to be back
[0:47] in court Monday for the next phase of
[0:48] the battle. The companies say they can't
[0:50] pay the bill. Opponents say they can and
[0:53] they must. Randle Kingston begins our
[0:55] coverage.
[0:57] 36
[0:59] billion280 million. In the history of
[1:03] American courts, no judge had ever read
[1:05] numbers like these from a jury's
[1:07] verdict.
[1:11] $790
[1:12] million. A lot of zero. In all, enough
[1:16] zeros to equal nearly $146 billion
[1:19] dollar in punitive damages that tobacco
[1:21] companies are supposed to pay for
[1:23] deceiving and harming Florida smokers.
[1:26] We believe this is a horribly flawed
[1:28] procedure. Defense attorneys quickly
[1:30] claim the award was the work of a
[1:32] runaway jury. If and when there ever
[1:35] came a day that the verdict had to be
[1:36] paid, there's absolutely no question it
[1:39] would put everyone of these five
[1:41] companies out of business 10 times over.
[1:44] Staggering jury verdicts have become
[1:46] part of the legal landscape, but the one
[1:48] the jury issued at a