US tobacco companies are gearing up to fight a ruling which awarded US $750,000 in damages to a lung cancer patient Grady Carter who smoked for more than 40 years. A six-member jury in Jacksonville, Florida recently passed the verdict against American Tobacco whose cigarettes were smoked by Carter. Until this ruling, the US tobacco industry had prided itself for not having to pay a single penny in damages to anyone claiming to have suffered from smoking cigarettes. Carter's lawyers produced documents which revealed that the company had deliberately concealed information about health risks of smoking.