D.C. Superior Court Rejects Class Status in Smoking Suit; Decertification Ruling Fourth in a Row, 14th Since the Landmark Castano Decision.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 26, 1999--

A D.C. Superior Court judge has denied class certification in a smoking and health case, and in an extraordinary 48-page opinion, the judge explained why even the most imaginative legal maneuvering cannot make such massive and complex cases manageable enough to be a class action.

"Too many individual issues exist," said D.C. Superior Court Judge Richard A. Levie in a ruling released late Friday. Levie reached that conclusion after exhaustively reviewing an attempt by the plaintiffs' lawyers to drop some claims in response to earlier rulings, including one by Levie in this case, rejecting class certification.

Philip Morris Associate General Counsel John J. Mulderig said Levie's opinion "stripped away all of the anti-tobacco rhetoric of the plaintiffs' case and laid bare their fundamental strategy - urging courts to ignore established rules and conduct a trial on only half of the critical issues needed to reach a final verdict."

Mulderig called the decision "an important event in class-action litigation. Not only is it the fourth such win for us in a month, but it is a point-by-point explanation of why these cases cannot work as class actions no matter how inventive or manipulative plaintiffs are in presenting their arguments."

For a court to certify a class, it must determine that several legal requirements are met which will ensure the class-action mechanism can work and will be an efficient and just manner to decide the class members' claims.

Judge Levie, in his opinion, said, "Plaintiffs essentially ask this Court to find predominance (one such legal requirement) by concentrating on defendants' conduct ... without ever considering the individual issues that exist."

Had Levie accepted plaintiffs' request, the outcome would have been a trial based solely on their allegations and could have produced a meaningless verdict on the so-called common issues, Mulderig said. But, as Levie noted, the crucial individual issues still would require individual determination at subsequent trials.

"It is plainly disingenuous for plaintiffs to suggest that they can somehow avoid these individual trials, and this court's decision is in line with the vast majority of courts that have seen that as a barrier to class certification," Mulderig said.

In rejecting class certification, Levie's decision is the fourth such ruling in the last month and the 14th rejection since the landmark Castano decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996. Earlier this month, courts in Arkansas, Illinois and New York ruled against class certification in tobacco cases.

Levie's decision was in Reed v. Philip Morris Inc., et al. (D.C. Superior Civil No. 96-5070.)