‘A Just and Important Fight’

When a Massachusetts jury in 2023 ordered R.J. Reynolds to pay $200 million to the family of a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer—the largest wrongful death suit award in Boston history—the family’s attorney, Walter Kelley, wasn’t surprised. 

“The verdict … wasn’t an anomaly or a fluke. It was a just result based on the strength of the evidence the jury heard,” Kelley says. “If future juries listen just as carefully to the facts and apply the law as instructed, I believe we’ll continue to see similar outcomes. That’s not just hopeful thinking—that’s what the law requires when the evidence supports it.”

It was a case Kelley believed in since the day he met Rita Jones in 2016. Jones came to Kelley’s office with a nose cannula in place. She was fighting metastatic lung cancer, the result of regularly smoking as many as two packs of Newport 100s per day for 50 years. She was gravely ill—in fact, she died in 2018 at age 70 before the trial began—and yet she buzzed with energy, Kelley remembers.

“She had a giant, warm personality and a genuine instinct to care for others,” says Kelley, managing partner in the Plymouth office of Bernheim Kelley Injury Lawyers. Also, “she had an incredible story and a good memory.”

Jones was 16 and living in Roxbury when, while walking to school, she and her friends were offered Newport cigarettes by a stranger. They were free, the adult distributing the product assured the girls. She was familiar with Newport—its advertising had been flooding her neighborhood, billboards and the like that featured smiling Black adults. Jones accepted the four-cigarette packet. 

The first cigarette made her dizzy. By the fourth, she liked the sensation. It made her feel grown up, she told Kelley.

She didn’t know that R.J. Reynolds had targeted her and others in her demographic, facts that would be discovered in internal company documents released years later. The free cigarettes and the focused advertising were part of the company’s effort to get her addicted to nicotine. 

In the decades that followed, Jones tried to quit. She told Kelley she didn’t like smoking, but she had to light up daily to “feel normal.”

“Rita’s story began in 1964 with a heartless greedy industry that chose profits over people, and it ended in 2018 with needless human tragedy,” Kelley says. 

It’s very important to me that I’m on the righteous side of things. … When my head hits the pillow, I feel very good about what I’m doing.

Kelley, 51, is the first lawyer in his family. In fact, he’s the first to earn an advanced degree. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in kinesiology from University of Massachusetts Amherst, he clerked at a prominent plaintiffs’ product liability firm in Boston while attending law school at night. That experience, combined with his blue-collar upbringing, set the course for his future practice, he says. 

“I knew early on I wanted to be a trial lawyer,” he says. “More importantly, I wanted to advocate for everyday people who had been harmed by large greedy corporations who are protected by massive insurance companies and their armies of white-shoe law firms.” 

Kelley finished his law degree at the New England School of Law in Boston in 2007. Among his first major cases and successes: standing for individuals who’d received defective hip replacement hardware from Stryker Orthopaedics and representing consumers harmed by high levels of zinc in denture adhesive Poligrip, a GlaxoSmithKline product.

“It’s very important to me that I’m on the righteous side of things,” says Kelley, a married father of two teenage girls. “It allows me to make a good living and provide for my family and gives me financial freedom, but also, when my head hits the pillow, I feel very good about what I’m doing.”

Jones’ wasn’t the first case that pit Kelley’s firm against the tobacco industry—and it won’t be the last, as he has a case against R.J. Reynolds scheduled for April 2026. His firm first got involved in the fight against Big Tobacco after the successful appeal of Marie Evans v. Lorillard Tobacco Company before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. That landmark decision established a critical legal principle: In Massachusetts, a cigarette that causes or sustains nicotine addiction is considered a defective product. Though he didn’t work on the case, Kelley followed it closely.

“As we began to investigate the industry’s conduct, it became clear just how egregious Big Tobacco’s actions and decades-long cover-up truly were,” Kelley says. “It was immediately evident to me that this was a just and important fight, one that had the potential to deliver real accountability and make a meaningful difference in the lives of countless families.”

His own first case against the tobacco industry came with Laramie v. Philip Morris. The firm represented Pamela Laramie, whose husband, Fred Laramie, died from lung cancer in 2016 at age 59. Laramie began smoking Marlboros, a Philip Morris brand, to emulate the Marlboro Man on the billboard in his neighborhood. He was 13. Soon after, he was smoking a full pack of Marlboros a day. 

The suit alleged that the tobacco company sold “defectively designed” cigarettes knowing they were addictive and potentially deadly. Philip Morris argued the famed 1998 Master Settlement Agreement precluded individual lawsuits against the company. In the MSA, the country’s four largest tobacco companies agreed to pay $240 billion over 25 years to 46 states, the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories to cover the costs of smoking-related health care issues. 

In 2021, Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court upheld the initial jury verdict in the Laramie case, ruling that the MSA did not preclude individual wrongful death or personal injury lawsuits because there’s a difference between damages sought by the state and damages sought by an individual, even if the suits are related to the same action.

The jury initially awarded the family $21 million, and the final payout amounted to approximately $33 million after interest accumulated in appeal. When the Jones case went to trial, Pamela Laramie came to court to show support for the Jones family.

“That just shows you the kind of people that I represent,” Kelley says. “They’re just good people that got caught up in something.” 

Rita Jones was “a tough woman, a strong woman,” and when they first met, Kelley says, “it was clear her motivation was really not about money. She was coming from a genuine place of caring for others and not wishing others to go through what she had just started going through.”

Jones felt she’d been wronged: R.J. Reynolds knowingly sold a product they knew was highly addictive and increased the risk of cancer. It chose to hide that information rather than use it to make safer products, or let customers know the real risk factors. 

The first time Kelley presented Jones v. R.J. Reynolds, it ended in a mistrial when a member of the jury looked up information online and shared it with the other jurors. Among the evidence presented in the second: Internal company documents showing that Big Tobacco had knowingly withheld damaging information about its products.

“Most people don’t appreciate how awful and terrible the story really is,” Kelley says. “What they said internally when they thought no one would see the documents, and what they said publicly were two different things.”

Although Jones died before the case went to trial, she had been able to sit for two depositions that were recorded and shown in court. Kelley feels that allowed the jury to better understand her, to see what her loss meant to both her family and her community, to hear why she felt R.J. Reynolds should be punished for its actions. 

Before deliberations, the jury requested that the 300 exhibits presented at trial be brought to the jury room. Kelley remembers watching a cart piled high with banker’s boxes of evidence being wheeled out of court. That’s partly why he wasn’t surprised by the jury’s verdict.

“This was a fact-based decision. It wasn’t about me or something I said that blew them off their feet,” he says. “It was eight very smart people who sat through three weeks of trial and deliberated for 13 hours.” 

The $200 million award didn’t surprise him either. It broke down to $25 million to Jones; $5 million to each of her children; and $150 million to punish R.J. Reynolds and prevent further harm. 

“It’s a penalty, yes, and that’s why it has to be big,” Kelley says. “When a jury actually does listen to the evidence, and gives it thoughtful consideration, and follows the law, there really is no other alternative.”