In the latest trial, cancer patient Richard Boeken was awarded $5.5 million in compensatory damages and $3 billion in punitive damages. Philip Morris officials said the company would appeal the verdict.

The amount of the award is nothing unusual in a region noted for its hostility to tobacco companies. Since California's ban on lawsuits against manufacturers was lifted in 1998, three product-liability lawsuits have been tried, with plaintiffs winning all three.

Smoker Patricia Henley, who sued Philip Morris for her lung cancer, was awarded $51.5 million by a San Francisco jury in 1999 before a trial judge reduced the award to $26.5 million. Last year, also in San Francisco, a jury ordered Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to pay $21.7 million in another lung-cancer case. The verdict is under appeal.

"There has been a remarkable lack of filings in California, probably because of the cost and the risk. But it is beginning to look like the risk in California and Oregon ain't too high," said Bob Brown, an attorney with a San Francisco firm that successfully represented smokers in two earlier lawsuits there.

The Boeken award is the fourth-highest jury award to any individual or family.

"Los Angeles is certainly developing a reputation as a hotbed of huge court awards," said Tom Harrison, publisher of Lawyers Weekly USA. "In the past, New York, Chicago and Texas had reputations for huge verdicts. But Los Angeles is rapidly eclipsing them."

Brown credits the judges in the cases for allowing jurors to review all the facts. "We have very good judges who don't buy some of the positions judges in the east have bought. The juries are not made up of wild-eyed liberals, they've just seen the facts and the facts are pretty bad," he said.

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