Washington ? Mayola Williams has been down this road before.

The $79.5 million award the smoker’s widow won in 1999 in a fraud lawsuit against Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA has been cut, reinstated, set aside and reinstated before.

Now the Supreme Court has once again set it aside in a 5-4 ruling Tuesday that business groups said could make it easier to restrain large punitive damages awards in product liability cases.

Yet the decision did not address a key argument made by Philip Morris and its supporters from a wide range of businesses – that the size of the award was unconstitutionally large. They had hoped the court would limit the amount that can be awarded in punitive damage cases.

That it didn’t suggests “the outcome will be the same” after the Oregon Supreme Court takes up the case of the smoker’s widow for the third time, said Robert Peck, Williams’ lawyer.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his majority opinion that the award to Williams could not stand because a jury may punish a defendant only for the harm done to the person who is suing, not to others whose cases were not before it.

The company had argued that the jury was encouraged to punish Philip Morris for health problems suffered by every Oregonian who smoked its cigarettes. Armed with this latest ruling, Philip Morris has “an opportunity to fully and fairly defend itself in this and other cases,” said Philip Morris Vice President William Ohlemeyer.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, joined with Breyer.

Dissenting were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas. Ginsburg said Tuesday’s ruling made punitive damages law even more confusing.

Jesse Williams died of lung cancer in 1997 at 67. He had smoked two packs a day of Philip Morris-made Marlboros for 45 years.

His widow argued that the jury award was appropriate because it punished Philip Morris for a decades-long “massive market-directed fraud” that misled people into thinking cigarettes were not dangerous or addictive.

She won compensatory damages of $800,000 and punitive damages of $79.5 million – 97 times the compensatory damages – in the fraud lawsuit she filed against Philip Morris. A state court previously cut the compensatory award to $500,000, which is unaffected by Tuesday’s ruling.