A Florida jury awarded a widow $23.6 billion in punitive damages in her lawsuit against tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

Cynthia Robinson claimed that smoking killed her husband, Michael Johnson, in 1996. She sued the cigarette maker in 2008. She argued R.J. Reynolds was negligent and failed to inform him that nicotine is addictive, and smoking can cause lung cancer.

Johnson started smoking when he was 13 and died of lung cancer when he was 36.

The jury award is “courageous,” said Robinson’s lawyer, Christopher Chestnut.

The Escambia County trial took four weeks, and the jury deliberated for 15 hours. The verdict included more than $16 million in compensatory damages.

In a statement, J. Jeffery Raborn, vice president and assistant general counsel for R. J. Reynolds, said, “The damages awarded in this case are grossly excessive and impermissible under state and constitutional law.”

“This verdict goes far beyond the realm of reasonableness and fairness and is completely inconsistent with the evidence presented,” said Raborn. “We plan to file post-trial motions with the trial court promptly and are confident that the court will follow the law and not allow this runaway verdict to stand.”

Robinson’s lawsuit originally was part of a large class-action litigation known as the “Engle case,” filed in 1994 against tobacco companies in which a jury had awarded $145 billion in damages. However, in 2006 the Florida Supreme Court overturned that verdict.

In its ruling, however, the state’s high court opened the door for individual lawsuits against tobacco companies.

The judgment, returned on Friday night, was the largest in Florida history in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a single plaintiff.

The Florida high court also let stand the jury’s findings that cigarettes are defective, dangerous and cause disease, and that Big Tobacco was negligent, meaning those issues did not have to be re-litigated in future lawsuits.

Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of premature death in the United States, killing nearly half a million Americans each year. The jury verdict will send a message that tobacco companies can no longer lie to the American people and the government about the addictiveness of cigarettes and the deadly chemicals in them.