Special interests have many friends at the Florida Supreme Court. The people have one — Justice Jorge Labarga.
The court’s stridently right-wing future was foretold when Gov. Ron DeSantis packed it with Federalist Society ideologues. The court made that reality brutally clear with a 6-1 decision to insulate the tobacco industry from potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for Floridians it sickened and killed.
Twelve years ago, in the nation’s most closely-watched class action against Big Tobacco, the court overturned a $145 billion punitive damage award and said some 8,000 plaintiffs would need to sue individually for their illnesses or the deaths of loved ones. It also held that they would not have to prove what the big trial already had: that cigarette smoking causes many kinds of heart and lung diseases and cancer and that the industry had misled people to believe smoking was safe.
