ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Closing arguments are under way in the first trial to pit the federal government against the tobacco industry. It's also the largest civil racketeering case ever brought to trial. The Justice Department accuses cigarette manufacturers of conspiring to hide the dangers of smoking, an allegation they strongly deny. The government wants a judge to impose marketing restrictions on the industry and force the companies to fund a nationwide anti-smoking program. NPR's Adam Hochberg was in court today in Washington. He joins us here in our studios.
Adam, this trial has been going on for nine months now. Bring us up to date, if you would, on the history of this case.
ADAM HOCHBERG reporting:
And it's a very long history. The trial, as you said, started in September, but the case actually goes back to 1998, when Bill Clinton was president and Janet Reno was attorney general and they filed this lawsuit. If you remember back to that era, that was a time when state governments had just won a huge settlement from the tobacco industry, a $200 billion settlement, and that followed state lawsuits where the states were trying to recover their costs of treating smoking-related illness. The federal government saw that, decided it wanted in on some of that action, as well, and it filed this lawsuit against the cigarette industry, and the Justice Department continues to pursue to this day.
BLOCK: And tell us a bit more about what remedies the government is seeking here.
HOCHBERG: Well, they're seeking a lot less now than they originally hoped for way back when the suit was filed. The whole idea of the government collecting a big financial reward here has been totally cast aside by the courts. The courts have said that in this kind of case, the only thing the government can get is some remedies that address the tobacco industry's future behavior, not punishing them for what they did in the past but trying to prevent them from doing bad things in the future. So what's left on the table in the lawsuit are a number of restrictions on the way that the cigarette industry might market its products, limiting the advertising of cigarettes or doing away with price promotions for cigarettes.
Another big part of this, the Justice Department wants the industry to pay for a national anti-smoking program. But that demand, too, has been scaled back. Health advocates had been pushing for a $130 billion anti-smoking program; the Justice Department said yesterday that they're only going to ask the judge for a $10 billion program. And at this point, the Justice Department is not saying why it's willing to settle for the smaller amount.
BLOCK: Adam, what's the government's legal strategy in this case? How are they going about to prove what they want to prove here?
HOCHBERG: It's an unusual strategy. The Justice Department is using a federal racketeering law that originally was passed to prosecute mobsters. The government's claiming that cigarette makers, kind of like an organized crime cartel, got together to break the law, in this case, by deceiving the public about the dangers of smoking. The Justice Department has brought out many memos that span a period in the 1950s, '60s, all the way to the turn of the 21st century, where the tobacco industry was plotting out a strategy to discredit those scientists who talked about the dangers of smoking.
BLOCK: Well, what has the tobacco industry said about that?
HOCHBERG: Well, they deny that any conspiracy existed. The tobacco industry is not saying that their behavior was perfect, but they say it's a house of cards for the government to claim that this was some kind of formal conspiracy. In addition, they say no matter what happened in the past, the law that the government is using requires proof that misbehavior is going on now and is likely to continue to happen in the future. And the industry's saying that no matter what happened in the past, it's behaving now like a good corporate citizen.
BLOCK: Now this is a bench trial; a judge will be ruling in this case, not a jury. Any sense of how long that ruling might take?
HOCHBERG: That ruling will probably take quite a while. Judge Gladys Kessler, who's been presiding over this case for nine months, has time now to review the testimony in the case, testimony from 83 witnesses. Maybe she'll want to look again at some of the 6,000 exhibits that were introduced, perhaps leaf through the 45,000-page transcript. And once she's done that, she'll hand down her ruling.
BLOCK: NPR's Adam Hochberg, thanks very much.
HOCHBERG: Thank you.
Copyright © 2005 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.