News analysis
Australia: lawyers ponder tobacco firms' criminal liability
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Over 20 years ago, Ernest Pepples, a Brown & Williamson lawyer, dared
put the unmentionable to paper
the possibility that the industry might
be held criminally liable for its conduct. He wrote: "If we admit that smoking is harmful to heavy smokers, do
we not admit that BAT has killed a lot of people each year for a very
long time? Moreover, if the evidence we have today is not significantly
different from the evidence we had five years ago, might it not be
argued that we have been `wilfully' killing our customers for this
long period? Aside from the catastrophic civil damage and governmental
regulation which would flow from such an admission, I foresee serious
criminal liability problems."
Pepples' anxiety is easily understood. The proposition that the
criminal law ought to apply to, and punish, those who knowingly engage
in conduct that causes death and disease is hardly novel. It does
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