Late last year, Marie Evans told a Boston jury how she got hooked on cigarettes. She described receiving Newports starting at age 9 from Lorillard Tobacco Co. representatives who came into her Roxbury, Mass., neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s to give away free samples. She was smoking by age 13.

Evans couldn’t be in the courtroom, however — the jury heard her testimony via a video deposition taped in May 2002, shortly before her death from lung cancer at age 54.