Tobacco.org

Note: These articles wink in and out of existence with the frequency of sub-atomic particles. Many links will be dead. In that case, these pages can be approached as bibliographies, both noting the event, and showing where you might look for further information.

Court TV will be taping the Norma Broin v. Philip Morris tobacco case in Miami, FL. While this trial will not be aired on Court TV, the video transcript of the trial can be purchased through the Court TV video library.

Let the record show: At 10:05 a.m. on Monday, June 2, 1997, in Courtroom 6-1 of the Dade County Courthouse, the largest, most comprehensive lawsuit ever confronted by the tobacco industry finally came to trial.

Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye dashed the industry's last hope of taming the trial. In orders released Monday morning, Kaye denied motions to break up the class and to strike punitive damages. Also, the Miami judge refused to rule that the tobacco industry did not conspire to misrepresent the dangers of smoking or secondhand smoke. That's debatable and for a jury to decide, Kaye's three-paragraph order said. "So we will go with a full-blown trial," announced court spokesman Mort Lucoff. Just how full-blown started to become apparent on Monday.

The judge refused a request by Susan Roseblatt, an attorney for the flight attendants, for the dismissal of two women in the pool of potential jurors. One of them said the ailing flight attendants should have found other work to avoid secondhand smoke, while the other wavered over whether she would be able to find the tobacco companies liable for the alleged injuries. . . The one juror both sides immediately agreed should be sent home described himself as a heavy smoker for decades and said, "I'm a smoker and my health is the same as it was when I started smoking."

A female smoker, who quit temporarily because "I got to coughing and I didn't like that," said people who think on-the-job secondhand smoke makes them sick should find other work. She was not immediately dismissed from the pool. Lawyers did reject a college student who said airlines, not tobacco companies, were responsible for smoke on their jets

"These plaintiffs herein have been strong enough and intelligent enough to resist the blandishments of the $40 billion behemoth, but they are powerless against the smoke of others."-- Case 91-49738, Broin et al. vs. Philip Morris et al.

"When I go to a restaurant, I ask for: smoking section, nonsmoking section, first available." -- From the questionnaire given to prospective jurors

"We're in new and uncharted waters here," R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. deputy general counsel Daniel Donahue said. "There is a measure of uncertainty that we've never had before." . . . "The industry has been brilliant at creating the image of a scientific controversy, when in fact there is a worldwide consensus," Stanley Rosenblatt said. "The only people standing on the other side is the tobacco companies." But experts say the research on passive smoking is rather skimpy, and issues such as the chemical makeup of different types of environmental smoke muddy the waters. . . In addition to what it sees as the weakness of the scientific evidence, the industry believes the Rosenblatts will be hard pressed to prove the companies did anything wrong by making and selling a legal product. "There's no legal basis for imposing financial penalties on an industry doing nothing more than what society says is OK," Donahue said.

Kaye, speaking towards the end of a second, slow day of jury selection in the landmark trial, criticized the questions put to jurors by Moss and attorneys for other big tobacco companies such as Philip Morris Cos Inc. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco as too firmly aimed at uncovering anti-smoking attitudes among the prospective jurors. "You have been playing with people's heads for two days ...," Kaye said. Kaye said smoking was a widely controversial practice, making it impossible to find a fully neutral jury of six and as many as a dozen alternative jurors to hear the case. Florida law only required that jurors be able to put aside their prejudices and decide on the evidence presented, he said.

Efforts to seat six jurors and as many as 12 alternates in Miami to hear a historic class-action tobacco lawsuit have become a laborious process. During Monday's first round of questioning, only five of 15 candidates were retained . . .

The slow pace of jury selection continued Tuesday, with only a few jurors questioned by the attorneys and the judge by early afternoon.

A big question has been whether presiding Judge Robert Kaye is himself a smoker. Courthouse workers said they had never seen Kaye smoking, but the judge refused to comment. "I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to say anything prejudicial," he said when asked. One attorney said he believed the judge had once smoked, but had quit many years ago. "I'm sure he quit cold turkey. He's a tough guy," the attorney said. But Kaye is not unsympathetic to users of tobacco products. During a pretrial hearing, he leaned down from the bench and said to a table of tobacco attorneys, "Do you need a smoke break?"

The judge in the Broin secondhand-smoke trial ruled Tuesday that prospective jurors be questioned separately out of fear that strongly felt differences over tobacco may unduly influence others and perhaps even influence the outcome of the $5 billion case.

Tobacco companies never have had control over the behavior of crew or passengers on commercial flights. Indeed, they have been powerless to stop the smoking bans adopted by, and imposed upon, the airlines. Its the carriers themselves and the federal government that have been in a position to regulate life on board American jetliners.

• 06/05/97 Suing Tobacco is Wrong, Readers Say Everyone agrees with Philipp Harper, again. MSNBC

Only 32 standby jurors, out of 60 needed to seat six jurors, were selected this week during five days of one-by-one questioning by attorneys pressing the secondhand smoke lawsuit and tobacco industry lawyers. "Let's try six people at a clip," trial Judge Robert Kaye of Dade County Circuit Court said.

Because Federal and Florida law are clear that punitive damages cannot be decided in a lawsuit before any finding of liability is determined, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company today joined co-defendants in asking the Third District Court of Appeals in Florida to reverse the court's trial order in Broin. Late this afternoon, the Court ordered plaintiffs to respond by Wednesday morning, June 11.

The unidentified female television-news producer was among 15 people questioned by judge and lawyers on Wednesday. She said she had produced a television report for Fox station WSVN Channel 7 on cigarette marketing, scheduled for broadcast that evening. Despite tobacco lawyers objections, she was placed in the pool of potential jurors . . . Tobacco company lawyers again on Thursday asked [Kaye] to remove the freelance news producer, saying her piece negatively portrayed tobacco companies and reflected a bias making her unsuitable to fairly decide [on the case] . . . After four days of jury selection, the standby jurors pool numbers 18. Some 60 are needed . . .

I turned around to find a woman puffing a Marlboro in my mother's face. . . I quickly switched places with my mom, who is a lung cancer patient, in an attempt to protect her from the unsolicited smoke. . . It is my lack of boldness in the face of smoke that boosts my admiration for people like Norma Broin, the 21-year flight attendant who initiated Broin et al. vs. Philip Morris et al.

Why don't they just sue the airlines? . . . The answer: State laws prohibit workers from suing their employers for virtually any injury suffered on the job. "Basically, the workers' compensation laws of each state were put in place as a substitute for" such suits, said R. Michael Fischl, a University of Miami professor who specializes in labor law.

Halfway through his final term on the bench, Kaye, 68 and a former smoker himself, is called low key and unflappable by lawyers who know him. And they consider him as ready as anyone could be for the nation's first megatrial of Big Tobacco, a trial that will be greatly influenced by his demeanor and his decisions.

Tobacco company lawyers . . . are ahead in the race to seat favorable jurors, repeatedly knocking out nurses and others who say secondhand smoke probably causes disease, according to trial consultants. "Tobacco's been really lucky at getting out people with knowledge about smoking and health -- all those nurses," said one Florida trial consultant after five days of jury picking for the Broin trial. "The plaintiffs must be crying."

Smoker or nonsmoker, nearly everyone remembered a public confrontation over smoking. Nearly everyone sampled cigarettes, and some could not quit. Nearly everyone held strong opinions. One man called tobacco "sinful." Another suggested it contributed to his marital problems. A woman said she started smoking at age 38 after her husband refused to stop. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," she said. She quit shortly before he died of lung cancer.

An experiment to speed up jury selection in the secondhand-smoke lawsuit vaporized Monday after both sides expressed concern that potential jurors could be "poisoned" through group questioning.

An outside lawyer screening cigarette-industry documents in a Florida class-action suit resigned after anti-tobacco lawyers complained he had social ties to a rival attorney, the trial judge said on Friday. Dade County Circuit Court Judge Alan Postman said Irwin Block had denied any social connection to Edward Moss, a lawyer for Brown & Williamson, a unit of B.A.T Industries (BATS.L) of Britain, but offered to resign to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.

A woman who wept on the witness stand as she remembered relatives who died from smoking- related illnesses was added Tuesday . . . The woman was accepted into the jury pool despite the emotional outburst and objections from industry lawyers, one of whom told Judge Robert Kaye that, at the very least, the defense was entitled to "a jury that doesn't cry during the trial."

Five members were added to the pool of potential jurors for a landmark anti-tobacco case Wednesday, bringing the pool's size to 62 out of the roughly 100 expected to be included

A Florida judge said Wednesday that attorneys in a class action suit filed by flight attendants against cigarette companies should no longer refer to "60,000" members of the class as they question prospective jurors. "I believe that the number 60,000 was pulled out of the air at some point," said Dade County Circuit Judge Robert Kaye. But he declined to grant the tobacco lawyers' request that no number be given for flight attendants that might be affected by the case. . . Defense attorneys said Wednesday that use of that number might deceive jurors because no one is sure how many people might actually be in the class.

"We will proceed as we are proceeding, and we will continue until someone convinces me otherwise," Circuit Judge Robert Kaye said as jury selection resumed. Responding to a motion filed by the flight attendants' lawyers, Kaye said he can envision a "very serious constitutional" clash if federal judges or officials attempt to terminate the state court case as part of a sweeping, nationwide settlement.

Tobacco industry attorneys Monday asked the Florida Supreme Court to force an appeals court to consider whether punitive damages should be part of [the Broin suit].

"I don't intend to do anything yet with this because there isn't anything to do (yet). We will proceed as we are proceeding," Kaye said. He did not rule on the motion but indicated that he did not feel that the talks would affect the trial, currently in its eighth day of jury selection.

Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, representing flight attendants who are suing the industry, will ask Circuit Judge Robert Kaye to declare that the case should proceed regardless of decisions made elsewhere.` . . `We want it clearly understood that whatever settlement is reached by other people will have no impact on us," Stanley Rosenblatt said Sunday.

Norma Broin, the American Airlines flight attendant whose bout with lung cancer prompted her to become lead plaintiff in the case, said she was angry at politicians and even health care organizations involved in the talks, which she viewed as denying her and others the chance to obtain relief. "I am just so opposed, very, very, very opposed ... These people deserve a day in court. It's just not right," she said.

Rosenblatt asked the court to inform jurors that workers compensation law prohibited the flight attendants from filing such a lawsuit against their employers. The plaintiffs believe that jurors who feel they should not be suing likely would not be able to be impartial. But Circuit Judge Robert Kaye declined to do so without granting the tobacco attorneys' request that he tell jurors that the flight attendants could obtain some relief by making workers compensation claims. Rosenblatt opposed that request. In that case, Kaye said, "We will just proceed as we have been proceeding."

Attorneys Stanley Rosenblatt and Ed Moss, field generals on opposite sides of the tobacco war now underway in South Florida, only grudgingly acknowledge each other. In public, they rarely exchange a civil word. In court, they squabble like petulant schoolboys. In private, they mumble insults. What most observers could never guess: Moss and Rosenblatt were once classmates at Central Beach Elementary and Ida M. Fisher Junior High in Miami Beach. And basketball teammates at Miami Beach Senior High. And fraternity brothers at the University of Florida. They have known each other for nearly 50 years. Sometimes, familiarity really does breed contempt.

Kaye declined to issue a motion but said that he would not allow anyone to interfere with the case, now in its fourth week of jury selection. "As far as I'm concerned, this case will go to fruition," he said.

By late Tuesday morning, 87 people had passed initial screening, putting them in a pool of standbys from which six jurors and 10 alternates will be selected. Dade County Circuit Court Judge Robert Kaye said in court that 125 standby jurors would be required, since each side can dismiss without explanation as many as 45 people.

Eight more potential jurors were selected for a landmark class-action lawsuit filed against tobacco companies on behalf of flight attendants -- a case that attorneys said would go ahead in spite of Friday's sweeping accord between U.S. states and the tobacco industry. The potential jurors added Monday, the 13th day of jury selection, brought to 83 the number in the pool from which attorneys will select a panel of six jurors and an estimated 10 alternates for the case

The lawyer argued the woman being screened was disposed against his suit, filed on behalf of thousands of non-smoking flight attendants whose tobacco-related illnesses were allegedly caused by breathing secondhand smoke aboard U.S passenger flights. Rosenblatt said the lawyers opposing him--numbering a dozen or more for Philip Morris and eight other defendants--were highly skilled at interrogating potential jurors, and they were generally succeeding in excluding people likely favorable to his case while including others likely to agree with the tobacco companies.

Rosenblatt said those defenses followed a pattern of four decades of lies, deceit, manipulation and denial of unfavorable research and damaging government reports. "They hid and they distorted and they lied about this information," he told the six-member jury. "The evidence will show it is a phony song. There is no more research needed." Rosenblatt promised to give jurors a historical overview starting from a 1953 report in the medical journal Cancer linking cigarette tar to cancer in mice. He cited depositions in April from executives of the four biggest cigarette makers denying tobacco addiction, despite a Brown & Williamson memo from 1963 calling nicotine an addictive drug.

The attorney pressing a landmark $5 billion secondhand smoke case ended his opening arguments on Monday with a plea that U.S. tobacco companies be severely punished for decades of alleged deceit. "Lies, fraud, deceit justify punitive damages," plaintiff attorney Stanley Rosenblatt said at the end of 2-1/2 hours of speaking.

Attorney Stanley Rosenblatt . . has told the court he will reveal evidence demonstrating the tobacco industry's 40-year history of deceiving the American public about the link between smoking and cancer.

The following individuals can provide editors and reporters with commentary on the $5 billion lawsuit brought against cigarette makers by flight attendants . . . They are leading experts with varying perspectives gleaned from ProfNet's Experts Database. You'll find complete entries at http://www.profnet.com/ped.

A former U.S. surgeon general, the leadoff witness in a $5 billion secondhand-smoke trial, testified Wednesday that the tobacco industry's own research in the 1960s and 1970s helped create a medical consensus that smoking caused cancer. Julius Richardson, the federal government's top medical official under President Jimmy Carter, also testified that the industry vigorously and unethically fought government anti-smoking campaigns and refused to cooperate with surgeon general's office researchers assessing smoking and health risks.

Government reports and scientific studies since the 1980s have established a connection between secondhand smoke and health hazards, a former U.S. surgeon general testified today. Julius Richmond, the first witness at a major trial against tobacco companies, said that by the time he issued his first surgeon general's report in 1979 there was no longer any scientific debate about links between firsthand smoking and cancer. . . Richmond, who served under President Carter, said that one day before he even made his 1979 surgeon general's report public, the Tobacco Institute called a news conference to refute its findings. "What they were trying to say was it's old stuff and it isn't true," said Richmond, who has never testified in a tobacco case. "They were attempting to create confusion about whether there was any relationship between the use of tobacco products and disease."

-Lawyers for the country's top cigarette makers told jurors Tuesday that flight attendants claiming illnesses from secondhand smoke were exposed to minimal concentrations in airline cabins and have not experienced

Studies showing secondhand smoke caused harm "were done poorly and were inconsistent and unreliable," Hugh Whiting, a lawyer representing RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., told the jury. But after the major tobacco companies' presentations, Liggett Group, a unit of Brooke Group Ltd., with 2 percent of the American cigarette market, broke ranks. The company's lawyer, Michael Fay, told the jury that Liggett and its owner, Bennett S. LeBow, disagreed with the underpinnings of the defense offered by the eight other industry defendants. He said Liggett has publicly acknowledged that smoking can cause lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema, and that cigarette smoking was addictive. Of the relationship to secondhand smoke to disease, Fay said Liggett's position was: "We simply don't know."

"There is no good strong scientific evidence that second-hand smoke causes disease in nonsmokers," said David Hardy, who represents Philip Morris Cos. (MO) and Lorillard Inc. "Almost everything in the world is harmful if you get enough of it."

Circuit Judge Robert Kaye had previously told the plaintiffs and defendants to stay away from the merits of the case. "You obviously are not following the court ruling," he said as he imposed the gag order after court convened today. . . The gag order was triggered by an impromptu news conference held Monday by R.J. Reynolds senior vice president Dan Donahue, after the flight attendants' attorney, Stanley Rosenblatt, had completed his opening arguments.

"There is no good, strong evidence that secondhand smoke causes disease in nonsmokers," said David Hardy, representing Philip Morris and Lorillard. "There is evidence, but you'd be surprised how weak that is."

He displayed a blowup of a pivotal piece of his evidence, a 1954 advertisement with the headline: A frank statement to cigarette smokers. The ad, sponsored by most major cigarette makers of its day, ran in more than 400 newspapers. Rosenblatt said the ad made false claims that tobacco CEOs echoed when he interviewed them under oath in April -- 43 years later. Among them:
• "We accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.
• "We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.
• "We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health."

The head of the world's biggest cigarette maker testified in a landmark $5 billion secondhand smoking case Thursday that smoking could be "psychologically habit-forming" but was far from physically addictive. James Morgan, chief executive of Philip Morris Cos. Inc., the biggest U.S. cigarette company, also testified in a videotaped deposition that he would not quit the tobacco business if cigarette smoking was proven to cause lung cancer and other diseases. He acknowledged that the great majority of people believe smoking causes cancer. Morgan's testimony was taken April 14 in New York and shown late Thursday to jurors

Lawyers defending tobacco companies in the lawsuit on behalf of non-smoking flight attendants with lung cancer and other ailments formally asked for a mistrial after Judge Robert Kaye of Dade County Circuit Court said some questioning of a witness by an attorney for RJ Reynolds Tobacco were based on "unproven and unsubstantiated" premises. "No. Denied," Kaye replied when a mistrial was requested. Kaye, in refusing to block the answer of a witness called by the flight attendants' lawyers, said, "A lot of the premises that you have exposed him to are unproven and unsubstantiated in any manner. You just throw figures out. He says, 'I don't know what the figures are,' and you continue to use them. That's inappropriate." The witness was Ronald Davis, a former head of the U.S. Office of Smoking and Health,

"I would say the exposure in airplanes is much more intensive, much more serious, much more dangerous than the exposure in homes," testified Ronald Davis, head of the U.S. Office of Smoking and Health from 1987 to 1991. . . Davis said modern aircraft were especially risky for secondhand-smoke exposure because as many as 50 to 60 passengers might be smoking and that the ventilation systems aboard jets did not allow for fresh air. "On an airplane, you can't open a window," Davis said. . . During cross-examination by Jeffrey Furr, an attorney for RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co., Davis said the annual reports on smoking issued by the U.S. surgeon general have yet to label secondhand smoke as a sure cause of disease among non-smokers.

For the first time anywhere, a jury heard testimony Wednesday about the hazards cigarette smoke can pose to nonsmokers. Among the words the jurors heard: lung cancer, asthma, emphysema, heart disease. Former U.S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond, testifying for the flight attendants who are suing tobacco companies for $5 billion, said the scientific community has concluded that secondhand smoke "does cause disease." "The risk is considerable from breathing secondhand smoke in enclosed spaces," Richmond testified.

By 1986, "it was really established scientifically that there was a relationship between environmental tobacco smoke and the development of cancer and other disorders," Richmond testified Wednesday. Asked about the danger from smoke to people like attendants working in enclosed spaces, he said, "The risk would be considerable."

Dr. Michael Siegel, who once worked for the Centers for Disease Control, said that exposure to secondhand smoke can cause lung cancer, heart disease and ailments in children ranging from asthma to ear infections and respiratory problems. Siegel, who has conducted several studies on the subject, said secondhand smoke is "an important occupational health hazard" for workers in restaurants, bars and airline cabins. . . Defense attorneys challenged Siegel's credentials, arguing that because he is not a cardiologist, for example, he cannot reach conclusions on the cause of heart disease or other diseases. Siegel is an epidemiologist -- studying the causes and effects of diseases -- and Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye ruled that Siegel could testify about a wide range of diseases. Siegel is a public health professor at Boston University.

'Over the course of a working lifetime, the person inhales an incredible amount of carcinogens," said Dr. Michael Siegel, a Boston University public-health professor and former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He estimated that the level of one inhaled carcinogen, N-nitrosodimethylamine, was the equivalent of smoking 12 packs of cigarettes a year for attendants, compared to the nicotine level of five cigarettes a year. Hugh Whiting, an attorney for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., downplayed the attendants' exposure to smoke by citing the five-cigarette figure in opening statements, but Siegel said that number is misleading because it doesn't take into effect carcinogens. . . In a blunt procedural move, Brown & Williamson attorney Ed Moss asked to strike all of Siegel's testimony, charging he lied about applying a lower average nicotine exposure level in his testimony than in a deposition in May. "In what way has he prejudiced you?" asked Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye. "Nail him to the cross" on cross-examination.

The effects of secondhand smoke on flight attendants were ignored until a scientific panel recommended in 1986 that smoking be banned on airliners, a chemist testified today. Donald Stedman, an air pollution chemist at the University of Denver, described how a National Academy of Sciences committee on which he served made that recommendation.

The maverick owner of the nation's fifth-largest cigarette company testified today that industry giant Philip Morris paid his financially ailing company's legal bills for several months in 1995 in an unsuccessful attempt to keep him from breaking Big Tobacco's solidarity on the issue of whether smoking causes cancer. "We accepted it for a while," said Bennett S. LeBow, owner of the Liggett Group Inc., "but they canceled after five, six months."

In an unprecedented spectacle, the chief executive of an American tobacco company raised his right hand yesterday, swore to tell the truth -- and then testified that cigarettes are addictive and produce deadly diseases. Overcoming a withering flurry of objections from attorneys paid by his own industry, Bennett LeBow, the maverick Miami executive who owns the Liggett Group, said he now agrees with tobacco's most strident critics.

Renegade tobacco executive Bennett LeBow testified Monday that industry giant Philip Morris offered to pay his Liggett Group's legal fees to fight anti-tobacco lawsuits during 1995 and that he accepted the money for months. . . LeBow did not detail how much Philip Morris paid to cover Liggett's legal fees but said his company in 1995 was paying lawyers costs approaching $10 million a year. . . Lawyers defending the tobacco company in the secondhand-smoke case repeatedly interrupted LeBow, who was subpoenaed by lawyers pressing the secondhand-smoke case. The judge called a recess to allow LeBow to meet with his lawyers after he said he was waving his right to confidentiality in detailing past discussions with his lawyers.

"...The answer is yes," LeBow said when asked by plaintiffs attorney Stanely Rosenblatt if cigarette smoking caused cancer. "Yes, we believe that for many people smoking cigarettes is very addictive," LeBow said in response to another question.

Philip Morris, the nation's biggest cigarette maker, paid a small competitor's legal bills for months in an attempt to buy its silence about the dangers of smoking, an attorney charged Monday. Stanley Rosenblatt, an attorney for flight attendants suing the tobacco industry for $5 billion because of illnesses they blame on smoky cabin air, made the charge with the jury out of the room during testimony by Liggett Group owner Bennett LeBow. Philip Morris "didn't pay his bills out of the goodness of their heart," Rosenblatt said. "That was a means of buying his silence and his cooperation so he would not be a spokesman for the opposite position."

Federal scientists were under "intense pressure" from the tobacco industry to soften their conclusions on links between cigarette smoke and disease in nonsmokers, an author of a surgeon general's report testified Thursday in a secondhand-smoke trial. "We would tend to look at what the data could show, and then we'd take one step back in order to be conservative because we knew that anything we said would be intensely criticized by the tobacco companies," said Dr. David Burns. . . Industry pressure included advertising, "but the characterization of science in those ads substantially misrepresented the substance of that science and did not reflect the consensus of what the scientific community thought," he said. The tobacco industry forced federal regulators to drop the standard method used with asbestos and ozone to evaluate the environmental exposure danger posed by tobacco, Burns said. Regulators normally extrapolate effects from high doses down to lower doses. But with tobacco, Burns testified, "We were unable or reluctant or inhibited, if you will, from doing it." Stanley Rosenblatt, attorney for the attendants, attempted to draw Burns out on whether the pressure delayed a ban an airline smoking, but that testimony was barred.

During his testimony, Dr. David Burns, an author of surgeon general's reports on cigarette smoking, told the court that federal scientists had been under pressure from tobacco companies to be conservative in their investigations of links between secondhand tobacco smoke and disease.

Testifying at a landmark secondhand-smoke trial, Dr. Thomas Houston said women's magazines were the top source of health information for women but Redbook, Cosmopolitan and others steered away from lung cancer stories so as not to upset cigarette manufacturers who buy advertising.

Cigarette advertising in women's magazines became a touchy subject at the tobacco industry's secondhand smoke trial during testimony in Miami on Wednesday by an official with the American Medical Association. Lung cancer gets less coverage than breast cancer in women's magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, even though the death rate in women is higher for lung cancer, Dr. Thomas Houston said with the jury out of the courtroom.

Flight attendants were exposed to carcinogens equivalent to a half-pack of cigarettes on every transcontinental flight shortly before smoking was banned, a chemist testified yesterday in the tobacco industry's secondhand-smoke trial. "It would have been substantially higher when you went back in time" when more people smoked and smoking areas on planes were larger, said Katharine Hammond, an associate professor of public health at the University of California.

"Second-hand smoke is by far the major health hazard faced by cabin crews and passengers," said Donald Stedman, an air pollution chemist at the University of Denver who helped write the 1986 report calling for a smoking ban. Katharine Hammond, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, also testified that her studies of second-hand smoke showed high concentrations of cancer-causing substances in airline cabins.

"The Federal Aviation Administration were really worried about the air quality for the pilots and that they were kept healthy but considered that they had no jurisdiction over the cabin attendants. They thought OSHA was taking care of that," he said, referring to the federal Occupation Safety and Health Administration. "But OSHA thought that FAA took care of everything that was in the air and so they weren't caring about that. This was a group of people who had fallen through a crack," he said.

A former tobacco researcher testified yesterday that he found cancer of the larynx in laboratory hamsters exposed to cigarette smoke in 1973, but the industry insisted he tone down the findings to erase the word cancer entirely. Dr. Freddy Homburger did as he was told in the study's draft but inserted it again without telling the Council for Tobacco Research, which paid for his work, while the study was in galley form just before publication. "I believed the science was clear that cancer was induced, and therefore it should not be masqueraded as a more benign situation," Homburger, a Boston University pathologist, said in a videotape

• 07/30/97 Florida Plaintiffs Build Case on Smoke, Disease Reuters
• 07/30/97 Specialist Testifies for Flight Attendants; Judge Allows Repititious Testimony Because Doctor Has "No Agenda" AP/Winston-Salem Journal
  
  Tobacco attorneys failed yesterday to stop a noted lung specialist from testifying in the flight attendants' secondhand-smoke trial, but they succeeded in blocking industry ads that portrayed smoking as nerve-soothing. Before Dr. Thomas Petty testified, Ed Moss, an attorney for Brown & Williamson, attacked the expert's potential testimony as duplicative, saying that the attendants' witnesses are not allowed "to repeat and repeat the same thing." The attendants could call 2,000 witnesses to say the same thing, he said. But Susan Rosenblatt, representing the attendants, said that Petty is a practicing doctor with "no agenda." "He has not been involved in any government-type movements," she said. Without Petty, Rosenblatt argued, the industry could tell jurors that the case depended on "these ivory-tower-type public-health officials that have a social agenda."
• 07/29/97 BROIN: Secondhand Smoke Linked to Illness; Jury Hears CEO Deposition Reuters
  
  "The mainstream of (medical) thinking is, very solidly, that environmental tobacco smoke, or secondhand tobacco smoke, causes lung cancer and heart disease," [University of Colorado pulmonologist Dr. Thomas Petty] said. . . Petty, who has won multiple awards and written many books and articles on smoking and lung disease, said he had examined Broin herself and the records of at least two other plaintiffs. The doctor later was cross-examined by attorneys representing tobacco companies who questioned the accuracy and completeness of research he cited. Later Tuesday, the plaintiffs' attorneys read the transcript of a taped deposition taken from William Campbell, former president and chief executive of Philip Morris. . . "To my knowledge it has not been proven that cigarette smoking causes cancer." . . .
• 07/29/97 BROIN: Lawyers Try to Exclude Testimony AP Washington Post
  
  Lawyers for the tobacco industry argued that the additional witnesses testifying about scientists' views on secondhand tobacco smoke would be repetitious.
• 07/29/97 BROIN: A Trial of Secondhand Smoke -- and Mirrors AP/Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
  
  After two weeks of testimony, jurors have been exposed to: * Two attorneys for the attendants against so many for tobacco that they overflow the well of the courtroom. * Continual objections and sidebars instigated primarily by tobacco attorneys. * Questions repeated to the attendants' experts to reinforce key points. * Cross-examination by industry attorneys that reinforces reasons for skipping statistics in college. . . Brown & Williamson attorney Ed Moss charged Rosenblatt was working to "plant the answer" in the minds of jurors when the questions themselves aren't allowed. Rosenblatt followed with a broadside . . . It's all in a day's work at the first ever secondhand smoke trial . . .

A former tobacco researcher testified Wednesday he found cancer of the larynx in laboratory hamsters exposed to cigarette smoke in 1973, but the industry insisted he tone down the findings to erase the word cancer entirely. Dr. Freddy Homburger did as he was told in the study's draft but inserted it again without telling the Council for Tobacco Research, which funded his work, while the study was in galley form just before publication.

"Anytime you were close to it you could smell it," pilot Hugh Fulton said as he showed jurors pictures of stained aircraft he had taken in 1984, adding that the stains smelled like "stale tobacco smoke." Echoing an airline mechanic who testified Wednesday, Fulton said the buildup of the sticky residue within aircraft valve systems would affect cabin pressure and temperature levels until workers used solvents to dissolve the brown goo. "The mechanics would come up to the airliner with a pump-up spray can ... to dissolve that sticky substance off of the parts so that it would once again move smoothly," he said.

Susan Rosenblatt attributed the slow pace to the tobacco industry attorneys' frequent objections, and what she said was their desire to prolong the case as long as possible. "We don't have a lot of control over these things," she said. "Our preference would be that it would go faster, but the tobacco industry objects constantly, and each time they object it delays things." . . Jurors are barred from talking to reporters, but the panel of 13 -- six jurors and seven alternates -- has shown signs of weariness with the long, often technical testimony. This week, jurors stifled yawns, leaned on their arms, rocked back and forth, and otherwise struggled to stay alert during four hours watching a videotaped deposition taken from an 81-year-old Swiss-born pathologist. Speaking in heavily accented English, the pathologist was questioned at length about his decision to use the word "cancer" rather than the 14-syllable medical term "pseudoepitheliomatous hyperplasia" in a 1973 report on the effect of smoke inhalation on hamsters.

"I quickly realized that it was one of the best examples I had ever seen of a careful, scientifically correct use of numbers in a public-health question," said Fred Bookstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan. . . Bookstein . . . uses the EPA study in his classes . . . He tried to put his testimony in layman's term but the jargon was weighty, including relative risk, confounders and co-variant. . . On cross-examination, he acknowledged that he did not read the underlying studies but said that the EPA summarized them and printed extensive statistical tables. Earlier in the day, an 81-year-old former tobacco researcher conceded that he is sometimes confused and forgetful about events that happened nearly 25 years ago. But Dr. Freddy Homburger stuck to his assertion that the industry tried to force him to drop the word "cancer" from his pioneering research and fulfilled a threat that he would "never get another penny" from cigarette-makers if he went ahead with his planned report.

Tobacco-smoke contamination in airliners was so troublesome that aircraft engineers gave up trying to eliminate it and ultimately recommended that inflight smoking be banned, an engineer testified yesterday.

Paul Halfpenny, an airline ventilation engineer, told jurors hearing a landmark secondhand-smoke trial in Miami that the design changes recommended in Boeing 737 and 747 aircraft would have reduced secondhand cigarette smoke and generally improved air quality. However, the changes would have required the jets to consume hundreds of thousands of gallons more fuel each year. This would have cost $663 million annually for the U.S. fleet of 737s and more than $1.3 billion for 747s used by American airlines, Halfpenny said. . . He admitted during cross examination, however, that the changes would have yielded only small improvements in air quality and the only real solution to the problem of tobacco pollution aboard airplanes was to ban smoking. "No matter what we did, it was always very difficult to prevent smoke from reaching the person beside you or behind you."

The judge in a $5 billion secondhand-smoke trial on Thursday barred former U.S. Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld from testifying about a letter written to President Nixon by an R.J. Reynolds Tobacco chief executive in 1972 that anti-tobacco lawyers allege led to Steinfeld's dismissal for his anti-smoking policies. The letter, reportedly written shortly before Nixon's landslide re-election, is missing. Rival lawyers said Steinfeld was unable to locate his own copy of the Reynolds letter, a search of the late Nixon's archives had proven fruitless, and Reynolds was unable to find a copy of the letter.

Tobacco attorneys attacked whether a communications professor was qualified yesterday to tell jurors that cigarette-makers waged a campaign of propaganda and misinformation with their advertising. After tobacco attorneys questioned Steven Carr's qualifications outside the presence of the jury, the judge severely limited the scope of his testimony. Plaintiff's attorneys then withdrew Carr as a witness in the $5 billion class-action lawsuit brought by nonsmoking flight attendants. Carr, 33, teaches propaganda as part of an introductory mass-media course for undergraduates at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. Tobacco attorneys challenged whether he had any expertise on tobacco advertising or its effects. "You have done no systemic study on what the perception or opinion of the American public is with regard to tobacco and health," said Ed Moss, an attorney for Brown & Williamson. "I don't need to -- people are smoking," Carr said.

K. Michael Cummings, the director of tobacco control for the Roswell Park Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y., said that ads gave smokers an excuse to keep puffing and questioned evidence that linked secondhand smoke with health problems. One ad in the mid-1980s was titled, "The Secondhand Smoke Screen." "These have been highly successful for the tobacco industry in creating that doubt in the mind of the smoker," Cummings told the jury hearing the $5 billion lawsuit on behalf of flight attendants exposed to smoky air inside plane cabins. For people exposed to secondhand smoke at work or at home, Cummings said, "This allays any concern they would have" and makes them think, " 'Maybe I don't have to worry about that.' " In cross-examination by tobacco attorneys, Cummings conceded that he didn't know what effect these ads had on flight attendants, but added that there is no reason to believe that they weren't equally swayed.

Shown a statistic of 450,000 deaths a year from smoking, ALEXANDER SPEARS, the chairman and chief executive of Lorillard Inc., called the figure a "P.R. statement." Lorillard, based in Greensboro, makes Kent, Newport and True cigarettes. "It's not a figure that is used with any real scientific support," Spears said in the video deposition. "It's not shrouded in good scientific procedures." . . Spears, who quit smoking 20 years ago after a heart attack, also said he didn't believe that nicotine was addictive and he didn't believe that there was any way of knowing how many people a year, if any, died from diseases caused by smoking.

A missing 25-year-old letter from a now-dead tobacco executive to a now-dead U.S. president kept jurors in a secondhand smoke trial from hearing the story that a former U.S. surgeon general wanted to tell.

The lead flight attendant in a lawsuit against tobacco companies testified Monday that she became aware of the health hazards of secondhand smoke only after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Norma Broin, a nonsmoker who is the lead plaintiff in a landmark $5 billion lawsuit filed by the nation's flight attendants, drew immediate objections when she linked her knowledge of smoke's disease potential with her diagnosis. The jury was instructed to ignore her answer

Tobacco lawyers objected repeatedly to testimony in which Broin, who was visibly nervous, tried to describe advertisements from tobacco companies which portrayed secondhand smoke as harmless. David Hardy, who represents Philip Morris Cos. (MO) and Loews Corp.'s (LTR) Lorillard Tobacco Co. unit, argued that Broin's individual opinions could not be considered evidence of what the general public knew about secondhand smoke. Circuit Judge Robert P. Kaye of Dade County Circuit Court upheld most of the tobacco industry's objections.

Tobacco lawyers, who wanted to bar her from the witness stand entirely, raised continual objections to her answers and at one point the jury was removed for 30 minutes while the lawyers argued.

The testimony of Norma Broin, the lead plaintiff in a $5 billion lawsuit filed on behalf of the nation's flight attendants, drew objections from defense attorneys and the jury was instructed to ignore her answer. But she made the same point when she said she realized in 1990 that secondhand smoke posed health risks, the year smoking was banned on domestic flights. Until then, the 21-year American Airlines attendant testified, she thought smoke was simply annoying.

When the jury was escorted from the courtroom, tobacco lawyers argued that Broin should not be allowed to testify about how she might have relied on public information about the possible dangers. "It's just totally prejudicial to allow her to testify on it in front of this jury," tobacco attorney High Whiting said. Judge Robert Kaye determined that Broin could testify as to what she saw or knew based on what she had read, but barred her from saying anything about whether she relied on that information to make decisions. When the jury returned, Rosenblatt asked Broin what she had known in the 1970s and 80s about secondhand smoke. "Basically that it was very, very annoying. That it wouldn't cause me any serious health problems," she said. "That it was an irritant. It wasn't a serious threat." When Rosenblatt asked her if smoking had not been banned on airplanes, whether she would be a flight attendant today, Broin replied "No," as tobacco lawyers rose to their feet to object. "Don't sneak in answers," one industry lawyer said as voices rose and tempers flared. "Don't start with me, either of you," Kaye admonished the attorneys.

There was "nothing corrupt or illegal" about a Tobacco Institute contract paying $2 million a year to the American Medical Association for research until 1971, a retired president of the cigarette trade group testified Friday. The 10-year contract was canceled after the research "produced no evidence to clear cigarettes" as a cause of lung cancer, a confidential memorandum said.

Attorneys for the tobacco companies told Dade County Circuit Judge Robert Kaye that their defense would take three weeks, or 10 to 15 court days, at most. Susan Rosenblatt, an attorney for the flight attendants, estimated that the plaintiffs would continue presenting evidence through next week and would likely rest their case on August 25. The balance of that week would be devoted to lawyers' arguments over which documents and other evidence would be given to the six jurors who will decide the case, Kaye said. "We're smack up against October," Kaye said.

A longtime president of the Council for Tobacco Research drew a blank in court Thursday when pressed to name any studies his industry-funded group did on smoking and disease -- its publicly stated mission. Robert Gertenbach headed the council from 1984 to 1992. . . Rosenblatt asked Gertenbach what he learned from council research about whether people should stop smoking based on health risks. "It is my lay opinion that causation is still up in the air," said Gertenbach, a lawyer.

A top executive testifying in an industry trial yesterday dismissed as "bizarre" an R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. report in 1972 suggesting that the company play up cigarettes as a nicotine vehicle that delivers satisfaction. . . "This whole thing strikes me as bizarre," Andrew Schindler, Reynolds' president and chief executive, testified on video in a lawsuit by flight attendants who blame illnesses on smoky cabin air. "I've never viewed the product this way in my entire time with the company and never talked to anybody that did."

In a videotape shown to jurors, Andrew Schindler, chief executive of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co., also testified that smoking itself was likely a factor in causing lung cancer but that health researchers had yet to prove the connections with the many diseases blamed on smoking. "They are a risk factor, and they may cause the diseases they are associated with, but it's not clear scientifically that they do," said Schindler in response to questioning by a lawyer representing 60,000 non-smoking flight attendants. Schindler said secondhand smoke has never been satisfactorily shown by researchers to cause medical disorders in non-smokers. "I don't believe it does. I don't believe that the epidemiology ... points in that direction," Schindler said. "There's absolutely no evidence for it," he said.

Walt Cofer, an attorney for Philip Morris and Lorillard, asked, "If cigarettes were wiped off the face of the Earth, would heart disease stop?" [Dr. David] Celermajer responded, "Heart disease would not stop but, my goodness, I'd be out of a job." He estimated that 95 percent of the heart attacks in his patients under age 45 occur in smokers and people exposed to cigarette smoke. He also cited a study last year that concluded that 30,000 to 60,000 Americans die from heart disease each year because of secondhand smoke. By comparison, the number of lung-cancer deaths is estimated at 3,000 a year. Evaluating the role of diet and exercise in heart disease, Celermajer said, "Next to those, I guess I would say smoking is a giant, and there are relative minnows."

Celermajer said he had six things to tell his patients. "Rules number one, two and three are: 'Stop smoking! Stop smoking! and Stop smoking!" "Rules four, five and six are: "Stop living near smokers! Stop breathing other people's smoke! Make your husband give up smoking," etcetera.

"An excessive quantity of tomato juice would have done that, as I recall," Johnston responded. "I don't know if there's anything to do with the human consumption of cigarettes at all." Rosenblatt shot back, "Someone told you if you took enough tomato juice and rubbed enough tomato juice on mice, that would cause cancerous tumors?" Johnston: "I have a general recollection of that, yes." Rosenblatt: "Who said that? I want to meet that person." Johnston: "I don't know."

'Johnston said he didn't know but he thought that inhalation tests done about the same time didn't produce cancer in lab animals.

"It's sort of an overworked term .... (People say) 'I'm a videoholic. I'm a chocoholic'," Samuel Chilcote, president of the Tobacco Institute, an industry trade group, said in testimony read aloud to jurors. "My wife has quit. I've known a lot of people who've quit," Chilcote said.

Jurors in a $5 billion secondhand smoke case complained on Tuesday that they had not been paid their $30 a day fees for about a month. "I'll do what I can," Dade County Circuit Judge Robert Kaye told the jurors, promising to talk to court administrators. "But they're like the IRS."

Tobacco company lawyers on Wednesday asked for a mistrial in a $5 billion secondhand smoke case, saying industry papers approved for use as evidence were protected by attorney-client privileges. Judge Robert Kaye of Dade County Circuit Court made no immediate ruling, a court official said. Jurors were let go about midday Wednesday and will not return until Tuesday, after the Labor Day holiday Monday . . . The documents presented include a Philip Morris memorandum from the early 1960s about the possibility of producing safer cigarettes and another discussing the chemical makeup of secondhand smoke.

The 1954 memorandum outlines the early days of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, the forerunner of the Council for Tobacco Research. . . The industry's position "has always been that CTR is this independent entity that has absolutely no interest in how the issues turn out," said Susan Rosenblatt, an attorney for the attendants. "It was never intended to get to any bottom-line answers on tobacco and health. In fact, it never did." . . In fighting to keep the memo from jurors, Joseph Moodhe, an attorney for the council, said that it had never been allowed as evidence at any previous tobacco trial. "I just don't see the relevance of that. We're talking about something that happened 40 years ago," he said with the jury out of the room. "It just isn't helpful. It's totally irrelevant."

Brown & Williamson lost its fight on Thursday to keep jurors in Miami in the nation's first trial concerning secondhand smoke from getting documents stolen from the cigarette maker's law firm and put on the Internet two years ago. The order by Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye duplicates decisions by other judges in California and Mississippi on tobacco papers purportedly stolen by a paralegal from a Louisville, Ky., law firm. "It was stolen from our files, and on that ground alone it should be excluded," said company attorney Michael Russ. But Kaye ruled the contents related to issues raised in the $5 billion case by attorneys for flight attendants suing the industry over illnesses they blame on cigarette smoke in aircraft cabins.

"Look, I'm not going to play this game. I really am not," said Circuit Judge Robert Kaye. "There's too many documents to worry about. I'm certainly not going to sit here and go through 20,000 of them," he said. Attorneys for flight attendants suing the industry over illnesses blamed on cigarette smoke in aircraft cabins said they wanted to offer a sampling from four boxes of ads and industry publications. But tobacco attorneys objected, indicating that they wanted to separate the documents by defendant and argue about them one by one. "I'm just not going to go over and argue each one: hearsay, relevancy and all that," Kaye said. "It's material if the matter has anything to do with cigarette smoking." . . . By the end of the session, Kaye was frustrated with the volume of paperwork facing the jury. "Don't you think you're overdoing it, for goodness sake?" the judge asked. "The question is whether it's useful or needed. . . . How much can they absorb?"

Lawyers pressing a landmark secondhand smoking case Tuesday sought permission to show jurors videotapes of two U.S. tobacco company chief executives saying cigarettes were a health risk

Tobacco attorneys are fighting every single attempt to put industry documents before the jury . . . So far, the judge has allowed the jury to see most of the documents the flight attendants have wanted to introduce. Even then, industry attorneys have complained about the flair and the inflection used by the plaintiffs' attorneys in reading highlights to the jurors.

Freshly released tobacco industry documents indicating lawyers were assigned to hide the health dangers of smoking will be kept out of a landmark secondhand-smoke trial, a judge ruled Friday. After hearing menacing words from a tobacco attorney about a mistrial or a long trial delay if the papers were allowed, Circuit Judge Robert Kaye decided the industry would be prejudiced by allowing the papers. Besides, he added, "It's not a smoking-gun issue." To keep the starting date intact, Brown & Williamson attorney Michael Russ argued that attorneys for flight attendants suing the industry over illnesses blamed on smoky cabin air gave up any right to the so-called Liggett papers before trial.

Liggett, a defendant in the secondhand-smoke lawsuit, did not object to the introduction of the papers. But Michael Russ, a lawyer for Brown & Williamson, argued the defense lawyers should have known before the trial began June 2 that the Liggett papers would be used in order to prepare properly. The tobacco lawyers will request a mistrial if the Liggett papers were allowed, likely requiring a hearing and extensive delays in the three-month-old trial, Russ said. "To change the ball game more than halfway through ... would be the most severe prejudice," Russ said. Kaye ruled that the Liggett papers were not crucial to the flight attendants' case and would unfairly damage the legal rights of the defendants if used in the trial.

An R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. researcher suggested in 1972 that the company promote nicotine in cigarettes as a drug, according to a memo read to the jury in a $5 billion smoking case Thursday. In the memo, first disclosed two years ago, Claude Teague proposed a "futuristic approach" to marketing focusing on cigarettes as "attractive dosage forms of nicotine." "A tobacco product is in essence a vehicle for the delivery of nicotine," Teague wrote, calling nicotine "a potent drug with a variety of physiological effects."

Now in their eighth week of presenting evidence, lawyers for 60,000 non-smoking flight attendants suing cigarette makers last presented a live witness Aug. 11. . . Jurors have complained to court personnel about the frequent breaks and days off, many used by the lawyers and judges to argue over the introduction of documents and pretrial testimony of industry executives as evidence, Kaye said. "Jurors don't understand what's going on here. They watch TV and things are resolved in an hour," Kaye said.

Pledges by a Brown & Williamson executive in 1977 to research tobacco and his denials of any disease link to cigarettes mirror the industry's defense in a landmark secondhand-smoke trial two decades later. Jurors hearing the case yesterday were read a speech given by Addison Yeaman, the cigarette-maker's general counsel, to an annual tobacco seminar on the industry's history on health research. "The position today is that we don't know what causes many of the diseases in which it has been claimed tobacco plays a part," he said. "I am utterly secure in saying to you that the tobacco industry recognizes its responsibility and its duty" to research health issues. . . Yeaman's speech in 1977 contrasted with his position within the company. He told his audience then that the industry-financed Council for Tobacco Research "has no propaganda function of any kind or any degree." Jurors already heard a memo by Yeaman written in 1963 saying that the council "was conceived as a public-relations gesture."

Lawyers for the flight attendants said their headline-making testimony contradicted the testimony of other tobacco executives presented earlier in the secondhand-smoke case. Dade County Circuit Judge Robert Kaye blocked Goldstone's testimony on grounds Goldstone had not been named as a possible witness by the flight attendants' lawyers before the start of trial. Bible's testimony could not be used because lawyers for Liggett Group, a defendant in the secondhand-smoke case but not in the Florida lawsuit, had not been allowed to question Bible during his testimony Aug. 21, Kaye said.

"We really put on the superstars of the public health community," said Miami attorney Stanley Rosenblatt, who represents about 60,000 nonsmoking attendants in a quest for $5 billion in damages. "These were hands-on medical doctors with an interest in the public's health." It is unknown whom the defense will summon when the trial resumes Sept. 17. Its case is expected to last three weeks. Lawyers for the industry say there is no scientific link between secondhand smoke in a confined area and any disease.

"This jury, I think like no other jury in the history of tobacco litigation, has gotten the full story of tobacco-industry behavior for the last half-century," said Stanley Rosenblatt, an attorney for the flight attendants.

Lawyers suing U.S. cigarette makers in a $5 billion secondhand-smoke trial rested their case on Monday, ending eight weeks of testimony meant to convice six jurors that the tobacco industry conspired to hide the dangers of cigarette fumes to non-smokers. Dade County Judge Robert Kaye ordered the defendants -- five cigarette makers and two trade groups -- to begin their defense Sept. 17. Before that, however, the tobacco lawyers were expected to request that Kaye dismiss the class-action case brought on behalf of 60,000 flight attendants with lung cancer and other diseases.

Wearied by a nine-week show and lulled by a two-week break, a Miami jury is about to be tutored in science and statistics by the tobacco industry. On Friday, Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye cleared the way for the defense in a landmark secondhand smoke trial to begin on Monday. . . Tobacco, in its turn, will argue there is no hard evidence linking secondhand smoke with illness in nonsmokers. Flight attendants were exposed to far less secondhand smoke than smokers' spouses, a tobacco attorney said in his opening statement in July.

The Florida judge in a $5 billion secondhand smoke trial ordered tobacco companies to begin their defense on Monday without deciding key legal challenges from the cigarette makers, a court official said on Friday. Circuit Judge Robert Kaye of Dade County Court said he was delaying a decision on the requests by cigarette makers for a directed verdict on some claims because he was worried about the effects of a two-week break in testimony.

Tobacco lawyers want the judge in a $5 billion secondhand-smoke trial to slash the legal claims against cigarette makers, saying no evidence pointing to an industry conspiracy had been shown to jurors. . . The tobacco lawyers [are] scheduled to argue Friday in Dade County Court . . . "Plaintiffs have approached the case as if it were a heresy trial, with witnesses swearing allegiance to the (secondhand smoke) causation thesis and implying that anyone who believes to the contrary is a heretic and a defrauder," Edward Moss, an attorney for Brown & Williamson, wrote in a court paper.

The engineer, Martin Godley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a specialist in aeronautics and was expected to discuss the ventilation systems aboard jet aircraft during the 1970s and 1980s.

An aviation engineer will describe the mechanics of aircraft ventilation when the tobacco industry opens its case this week in the landmark secondhand-smoke case brought by the country's flight attendants. Judge Robert Kaye of Circuit Court previewed computer-generated animation Friday showing a jet pull back from a gate and take off and the innards of on-board air-circulation systems. "This goes to show why environmental tobacco smoke does not cause disease -- period -- on planes," Walt Cofer, an attorney for Philip Morris . . .

Martin Godley, an engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified for the defense that prior to 1988, when smoking was banned on U.S. airliners, airlines used a costly technique for ventilating cabins that brought in all fresh air and blew out stale air. He estimated that the air moving in and out of a jet cabin during flight changed at 45 times the rate of the air of a typical home. Godley also testified that such systems do little to screen out other possible pollutants, such as ozone, a naturally occuring carcinogen which may enter jets at high altitudes, and cosmic radiation. Both may have contributed to the flight attendants' illnesses, tobacco lawyers have said.

A tobacco-industry chemist who has studied secondhand smoke for 12 years testified yesterday in the landmark case by flight attendants that there isn't solid proof that smoking tobacco causes disease. "You're asking me to say that there's no possibility of a health effect. As a scientist I can't do that," Michael Ogden, who works for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. of Winston-Salem, said on cross-examination. "What I can tell you is that there is not sufficient proof."

A judge likened a workplace-smoke study commissioned by the tobacco industry to "a fox in the henhouse," prompting motions yesterday by industry attorneys for a mistrial and the judge's removal from the case. Judge Robert Kaye of Circuit Court pocketed both motions in the landmark $5 billion secondhand-smoke case brought by the country's nonsmoking flight attendants. He already has rejected one mistrial motion and delayed a ruling on another until the end of trial.

Circuit Judge Robert Kaye refused to step down from the case brought by the nation's nonsmoking flight attendants and said he would wait until the end of the trial to rule on the industry's separate motion for a mistrial. The upheaval came during the questioning of Roger Jenkins, the author of the workplace-smoke study. He was questioned without the jury present. Industry lawyers wanted to ask him about his study of 1,564 nonsmokers in 16 cities who wore air-sampling monitors at home and at work in 1993 and 1994 when only 12 percent of the workplaces allowed smoking. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. commissioned the study for the industry's Center for Indoor Air Research, and Reynolds analyzed the air samplers. "It reminds you of having the fox in the henhouse in a situation like this," Kaye said in refusing to allow testimony on the study. "This trial reminds me of Alice in Wonderland because every day gets curiouser and curiouser." Brown & Williamson attorney Ed Moss said the judge's remarks showed his bias and meant the industry "ought to be in fear of getting a fair trial here."

Tobacco lawyers angrily demanded on Tuesday that the trial judge in a $5 billion secondhand- smoke case step down after they lost a hard-fought bid to tell jurors about a study sponsored in part by a leading tobacco company. Lawyers argued for more than an hour over admitting the secondhand-smoke study in 1993-94, which plaintiffs said was tainted by RJ Reynolds Tobacco's role in the research. Reynolds, the second-largest U.S. cigarette maker, conducted chemical analyses for the study and had close ties to the company which found the study volunteers. . . "What really bothers me is RJ Reynolds' relationship to what was supposed to be an independent study."

The air in airline cabins recycles every two to six minutes, compared with once every three hours in an average household, an aviation engineer testified . . . But on cross-examination, jurors learned the industry's first witness, Martin Godly, specializes in aviation finance, and his consulting firm has been paid more than $262,000 for the trial work in the past two years. . . Asked about outflow valves, where cabin air is expelled from the aircraft, Godly said they "were getting gunked up with whatever pollutants" were filtered out of the passenger compartment. On cross-examination, he testified: "Certainly, they were cleaner after the smoking was no longer allowed."

The scientific director of the industry-funded Council for Tobacco Research acknowledged Tuesday that, in terms of statistics and everyday usage, smoking causes cancer. But Harmon McAllister testified in a landmark secondhand-smoke trial that the exact mechanism hasn't been found, so a separate scientific definition of "cause" leaves the cancer link unproven. On cross-examination, McAllister was required to answer the question, "Does cigarette smoking cause lung cancer or doesn't it?" "In the epidemiologist's framework, sure. In the common, everyday terms -- `Does smoking cause cancer' -- not thinking of it scientifically, you can accept that. Yes, it does," he said. "There's no doubt that the association is very strong, that public health measures need to be taken."

The U.S. tobacco industry has spent $300 million since the 1950s on research into smoking and disease, the scientific director of a leading cigarette trade group testified on Tuesday. Harmon McAllister, scientific director for the Council for Tobacco Research-USA Inc (CTR), told jurors in a $5 billion trial involving the health effects of secondhand smoke that the industry has funded the work of independent researchers. The research has kept pace with medical developments since 1954, when the council was formed, he said. Initially, industry-funded research concentrated on population studies. It now focuses on genetic and molecular studies into the causes of cancer and other diseases, he said. "CTR has done a lot to unlock the problems in disease, McAllister said.

Speculation arose Monday about a possible settlement in the $5 billion secondhand smoke trial still under way in Dade Circuit Court, but the plaintiffs' lawyer said he has received no offers from the tobacco industry. `. . On Monday, the Bloomberg News Service quoted an industry analyst as saying Big Tobacco was considering a settlement, but the report seemed speculative. "Even if there's a 20 percent chance of losing, they're going to settle the case to avoid jeopardizing the national settlement," analyst Gary Black of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. told Bloomberg.

Scientists do not agree on what should be removed from cigarettes to make smoke safer, a tobacco industry chemist testified Monday in a landmark secondhand smoke trial. "There's never been scientific consensus about what in cigarette smoke, if anything, should be reduced or removed," said David Townsend, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's vice president of product development.

David Townsend, a scientist and vice president for research at Reynolds, said dozens and dozens of substances had been examined by industry scientists since the 1950s, when the controversy over health and smoking first raged in the U.S. "There's never been a scientific consensus about what should be removed in cigarettes," Townsend said. "Over the years we have taken these ideas seriously. Even as we've seen the scientific community put different ideas on the table, we haven't walked away."

Tobacco companies have been uncharacteristically humble of late as they have sought a nationwide peace with their legal adversaries. But they are fighting back in their fabled hard-nosed style against a landmark class-action suit here that seeks damages for ailments supposedly caused by secondhand smoke.

A Lorillard toxicologist testified yesterday that he has not been able to produce lung cancer in rats exposed to cigarette smoke, but did find changes in the lung's lining that never progressed beyond a scabbing. In experiments placing rats in chambers to simulate secondhand smoke, Christopher Coggins said that some reversible nasal irritation appeared but, in the lung, "We did not see any response whatsoever." . . . "The animal studies just do not show lung cancer," Coggins said.

No studies have been performed to determine whether flight crews exposed to secondhand smoke have higher disease rates than the general population, according to a public-health expert's testimony read in court yesterday. The tobacco industry told jurors about the lack of research in its opening statement. But a deposition by John Spengler, a public-health professor at Harvard University, was the first testimony in the four-month trial to reflect that. The testimony in the landmark $5 billion case puts jurors on notice that they will have to draw their own conclusions about the health effects of smoke based on related studies.

Circuit Judge Robert Kaye has shot down two attempts in the past two weeks to expand testimony about the possible causes of illness among flight attendants suing the tobacco industry for $5 billion in damages. But he will confront the issue again this week when industry attorneys seek to call as a witness the physicist Robert Barish, author of The Invisible Passenger: Radiation Risks for People Who Fly.

In his testimony for the tabocco industry on Monday, a statistician said the 59 workplace and home studies do not support a causal link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Edwin Bradley said that while 11 studies supporting a link were statistically significant, other factors -- such as fibs about a study subject's smoking history -- could have added flaws that unintentially distorted the conclusions. Bradley, biostatistics professor emeritus at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was testifying for the defense in a lawsuit by flight attendants suing over illnesses blamed on smoky cabin air. "The workplace studies do not provide evidence that's consistent with a causal relationship of environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer," he said. "It could all occur by chance." . . Before drawing his conclusions about the reliability of the research, Bradley walked jurors through a thicket of statistical jargon, including relative risk, confidence intervals, probability values, confounding and unintentional bias.

Cosmic rays -- the stuff of science fiction -- may bombard the courtroom where jurors are hearing a landmark secondhand-smoke trial, but a judge has the superhuman power to shield them from its ill effects. Circuit Judge Robert Kaye has shot down two attempts in the past two weeks to expand testimony about the possible causes of illness among flight attendants suing the tobacco industry for $5 billion in damages. But he will confront the issue again this week when industry attorneys seek to call as a witness the physicist Robert Barish, author of The Invisible Passenger: Radiation Risks for People Who Fly.

A break in defense testimony in Florida's $5 billion secondhand-smoke case spurred speculation Thursday that cigarette makers may be discussing a settlement. Testimony was recessed Thursday at the request of defense attorneys who, according to a court official, told Judge Robert Kaye that witnesses scheduled to testify Thursday would be unavailable. A source who is familiar with the trial and who spoke on condition of anonymity, said attorneys might be discussing a settlement. Speculation of a possible settlement of the claims of an estimated 60,000 non-smoking airline flight attendants was also fed by the extended courtroom absences this week of Susan Rosenblatt, a member of the husband-and-wife legal team pressing the case.

"My conclusion here is that ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] is associated to cardiovascular disease but is not consistent with a causal relationship," said Orlando Gomez, assistant professor at the University of Miami medical school.

An epidemiologist called by cigarette makers fighting a Florida lawsuit conceded on Wednesday that health studies had shown a weak link between heart disease and exposure to secondhand smoke. But Oscar Gomez, a tenured professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine, said the statistical associations in a landmark Harvard University study of nurses, published last May, were weak. He said there was no evidence showing a causal relationship between secondhand smoke and cardiovascular ailments. Gomez . . . said he was paid about $40,000 by tobacco companies to review 21 health studies on secondhand smoke

Until now, Circuit Judge Robert Kaye allowed the mention of other possible causes of disease in flight attendants but said he didn't want to dwell on the subject. But Walt Cofer, an attorney for Lorillard Inc. and Philip Morris Cos., wanted to call Robert Barish, the author of The Invisible Passenger: Radiation Risks for People Who Fly, on radiation as a cause of cancer.

Cigarette makers suffered a setback Tuesday when a judge prevented jurors from hearing medical testimony that blamed flight attendants' ailments on cosmic radiation rather than cigarette smoke from passengers. . . Judge Robert Kaye of Dade County Court sided with the attorneys representing 60,000 ailing flight attendants. He said testimony by radiotherapy physicist Robert Barish would be heard in a possible second-round of trials to determine what monies, if any, the cigarette makers would pay if found by a jury in the current trial to have produced dangerous products and conspired to hide the dangers. "This is a phase two issue and I will sustain the plaintiffs," Kaye said.

Key Provisions

THE tobacco industry won an unexpected reprieve yesterday when a landmark trial about "second-hand smoking" ended in settlement, forestalling a jury verdict that would have set a precedent for dozens of follow-up cases.

Experts said the deal could open the floodgates to lawsuits unless the industry can short-circuit the claims under the proposed $368 billion national settlement that is awaiting approval from Congress and President Clinton. "This might well open the door to a lot of other lawsuits by other workers that are traditionally cooped up ... who've had to have a constant diet of secondhand smoke," said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of law at Georgetown University who follows tobacco litigation.

Not one of the estimated 60,000 flight attendants represented by the lawsuit will get any money from the deal, but the defendants agreed to pay Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, $46 million in fees and $3 million in court costs. "Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblatt are heroes to the flight attendants," Broin said at a news conference after the settlement was announced in Dade County Court. "They took this case on in 1991 when the chances of my being here now were 7 percent." . . All flight attendants can sue individually and will benefit from tobacco industry concessions, which weaken the industry's traditional defenses against secondhand-smoke lawsuits for emphysema, lung cancer and some other diseases. In what lawyers said was a legal first, the tobacco industry also agreed to waive statutes of limitation that could have prevented thousands of flight attendants whose illnesses dated back to the 1930s from filing individual actions.

"The plaintiffs and the defense have settled this case," Circuit Judge Robert Kaye told jurors today. He said he couldn't give them details, and praised lawyers and jurors alike for their handling of the "extremely difficult" case.

Tobacco firms said on Friday they agreed to fund a $300 million foundation, making payments of $100 million per year . . The industry also said it agreed to back bans on smoking on international flights under the agreement . . . A Dade County Court spokesman said the deal, which is subject to final approval, also means the tobacco industry will pay $46 million in legal fees to Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt . . .

Prof. Susan Koniak of Boston University Law School, a noted liberal, expressed almost identical concerns. "The only ones who got rich here are the lawyers," said Professor Koniak, who has written extensively about jury awards. Ms. Koniak said that if she were a plaintiff and her lawyer told her that at the end of the effort the lawyer would get a handsome fee while a larger amount of money would go to benefit society, and she would get nothing herself, she would say, "Are you insane? Why would I possibly agree to that?"

It's big in that it lowers the investment risk of the ever-volatile tobacco stocks, and small in that the $300 million price tag on the agreement will be rather easy for the $50 billion industry to absorb, analysts said. Therein lies the answer to why tobacco stocks have gained ground in what is otherwise a depressed Friday market. "The market likes it everytime litigation uncertainty is removed from the tobacco sector," said industry analyst Martin Feldman of Smith Barney Inc. Settling the second-hand smoke case, commonly called Broin which is the name of the lead plaintiff, removes "an enormous unknown," he added.

"It will be the burden of the settling defendants, rather than class members, to prove that secondhand tobacco smoke in airline cabins is not a cause of those particular diseases in flight attendants," attorneys Susan and Stanley Rosenblatt said in a statement on the $350 million settlement deal.

The industry's defense over the last three weeks was hurt by rulings which kept key testimony from the jury and a concession by an epidemiologist hired by the tobacco industry that health studies showed links between secondhand smoke and heart disease. Stanley Rosenblatt said a number of uncertainties spurred his willingness to settle. It was not clear how the jury had perceived the evidence at trial. It was not known whether the judge would allow the issue of punitive damages to be put to the panel. And appeals could take years. "There were simply too many uncertainties," he said. Two key concessions prompted the settlement, Rosenblatt said. The industry allowed the flight attendants to retain the right to sue individually, and agreed to take on the burden of proof in future lawsuits for some diseases such as lung cancer. As a result, when a flight attendant sues, the industry will have to prove that secondhand smoke did not cause his or her disease, effectively reversing the traditional burden under U.S. law that plaintiffs must prove their case.

The settlement funds [$300M] will be directed to medical research relating to cigarette smoking. The settlement permits flight attendants to pursue their personal injury claims individually, if they choose to do so [but "may not seek punitive damages"]. Individual class members filing personal injury claims must prove that they were directly harmed by environmental tobacco smoke. On that basis, the companies remain confident of their respective positions on this issue and intend to present compelling evidence to juries in any individual cases that may be filed .. . The Broin settlement is a practical solution to this tobacco class action and reflects the common sense approach embodied in the June 20 agreement.

Maverick tobacco firm Brooke Group Ltd's Liggett Group will not have to pay anything in the $350 million settlement of a landmark secondhand smoke case that was announced on Friday, the plaintiffs' attorney said. "Liggett was never more than a side thought," plaintiffs' lawyer Stanley Rosenblatt said.

In view of new evidence that regular exposure doubles a nonsmoking worker's risk of dying of a heart attack, that exposed nonsmokers have a known carcinogen in their blood, that exposure compounds the risks of heart disease by lowering the "good" cholesterol (HDL), and that secondhand smoke kills more Americans each year than automobiles, AIDS, guns, or all crimes, even the tobacco industry realized it could no longer win on this issue in court.

"It's the third major case that they've settled in four months," said Richard Daynard, who heads the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University . . . "You're talking about an industry that's on the run. They're obviously dead scared of ever letting a jury consider the evidence against them. They'll do anything to stop them." Analyst Tim Swanson at the brokerage A.G. Edwards said the announcement was positive for the industry . . . "I think this is a clear sign that the tobacco companies are motivated (to settle)," Swanson said. "I think it should be considered a public relations victory for them."

"The flight attendants that have diseases are going to go ahead with individual lawsuits," Stanley Rosenblatt said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." "We're not going to be able to represent all of them but we will arrange for lawyers to take on these cases," he added.

"It's the third major case that they've settled in four months," said Richard Daynard . . . "You're talking about an industry that's on the run. They're obviously dead scared of ever letting a jury consider the evidence against them. They'll do anything to stop them." "I think this is a clear sign that the tobacco companies are motivated (to settle)," [analyst Tim] Swanson said. "I think it should be considered a public relations victory for them."

Once confident it could snuff out the first class-action lawsuit on secondhand smoking, the tobacco industry suddenly had second thoughts. The major cigarette companies, their defense weakening four months into the long-shot liability case filed by flight attendants, settled by agreeing to pay $300 million for research on tobacco and disease. . . Polls of mock juries conducted by the tobacco camp during the trial were turning out worrisome results, people familiar with the situation say. "The litigators down there had really big concerns," says one person. "They were giving terrible odds, and things kept getting worse." A loss could have risked the $368.5 billion national-settlement proposal, which would grant broad immunity to the tobacco companies from liability for illnesses related to smoking

It is the press release by ASH which captured the truth, for a change: "The tobacco industry's willingness to settle rather than fight . . . should send a strong message to all businesses: "prohibit smoking or get sued." . . . And, as this press release shows, the anti-smokers greatest coup is the tobacco industry's abject surrender to their fraudulent ETS-heart disease claims - WHICH WE SMOKERS HAVE EXPOSED! . . We smokers would have won that ETS case, and annihilated the bulk of the anti-smokers' active smoking claims as well. If the tobacco industry is unable to win on these issues, it is solely because THEY DO NOT WANT TO WIN.

Questions are already cropping up over whether 60,000 nonsmoking flight attendants are really covered by the complicated agreement and whether workers who are healthy today have wrongly assumed the class-action settlement could help them in the future. In the first of what are expected to be multiple legal challenges to the settlement, a veteran American Airlines attendant on Tuesday filed an objection in a Florida state court, complaining that the agreement wouldn't be fair to workers who may have contracted illnesses from exposure to secondhand smoke.

`This is not an unusual type of motion in any type of class action," Edward Moss, who represented Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp, a unit of B.A.T Industries Plc (BATS.L), told Reuters. "It would be very surprising to me if there were not some objectors." However, Moss and other attorneys said it was impossible to guess how Dade County Circuit Judge Robert Kaye, who must grant final approval of the settlement, would respond to any motions. "The judge is going to have to be satisfied that this settlement is in the best interests of the class," Moss said.

A Florida attorney filed a motion on behalf of an American Airlines flight attendant on Tuesday to intervene in the $349 million settlement of a landmark secondhand smoke lawsuit against the tobacco industry. Attorney Eric Olsen of Jensen Beach, Fla., said his client was "concerned" about whether the settlement, which provided no money for the 60,000 flight attendants covered by the class-action lawsuit, met appropriate legal standards. Olsen said the motion was not aimed at derailing the settlement, in which the tobacco industry agreed to pay $300 million to start a secondhand smoke research foundation and $49 million in court costs and legal fees.

Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group filed a formal challenge Monday to the $300-million settlement in the first class-action case that tested cigarette maker's liability for illnesses allegedly caused by secondhand smoke, contending that the recent agreement is unfair to the plaintiff flight attendants. "The settlement violates fundamental tenets of fairness and adequate representation" because its principal benefit is not cash paid to the class members but a $300-million payment to a medical research foundation named in honor of lead plaintiff Norma Broin, according to the brief filed by Brian Wolfman and Alan Morrison of Public Citizen. Flight attendant Broin, a nonsmoker, contracted lung cancer in 1989.

Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group filed a formal challenge Monday to the $300-million settlement in the first class-action case that tested cigarette maker's liability for illnesses allegedly caused by secondhand smoke, contending that the recent agreement is unfair to the plaintiff flight attendants. "The settlement violates fundamental tenets of fairness and adequate representation" because its principal benefit is not cash paid to the class members but a $300-million payment to a medical research foundation named in honor of lead plaintiff Norma Broin, according to the brief filed by Brian Wolfman and Alan Morrison of Public Citizen. Flight attendant Broin, a nonsmoker, contracted lung cancer in 1989.

U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum joined with legal scholars and others in support of a proposed $349 million settlement of a landmark secondhand-smoke case by flight attendants against cigarette makers. . .The attendants' attorneys "obtained maximum benefits for class members against extraordinary odds," wrote Metzenbaum, chairman of the board of the Consumer Federation of America.

Monday's hearing ended without a ruling by Kaye, but one is expected within weeks. Rosenblatt called tobacco counsel "serious, hard-working, intelligent and skillful" lawyers. In court papers, the tobacco defendants cited adversaries' "perseverance, competence and stamina."

Lawyers representing dissident flight attendants on Monday asked a Florida judge to undo a landmark $349 million settlement of a class-action suit on secondhand smoke. Lawyers from Chicago, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere said the 1997 agreement creating a $300 million foundation on secondhand smoke was wrongheaded and gave cigarette makers too much shelter from future lawsuits by flight attendants claiming injuries from other people's smoking.

Norma Broin couldn't find a lawyer to save her life. . . Years later, the Stafford, Va., woman is waiting for a judge to formally accept a $349 million settlement of her landmark case. A final hearing in the case is set Monday before Circuit Judge Robert Kaye.

Thousands of flight attendants geared up Friday to seek damages from Big Tobacco after a state court judge in Miami approved a $346 million settlement that ended a class action suit over secondhand smoke aboard airliners. The deal, approved by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Robert P. Kaye, allows attendants to file individual lawsuits against tobacco companies for damages. It ended a class action filed in 1991 on behalf of attendants nationwide. Most of the individual cases are expected to be filed and tried in Miami, although plaintiffs from other parts of the country could seek their day in court closer to home. "We're very pleased," said Miami lawyer Stanley Rosenblatt

While the settlement was in the flight attendants' favor, a small but growing number now feel the agreement was harmful because it left all 60,000 flight attendants out in the cold. Their frustrations center on Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, husband and wife attorneys who represented the flight attendants and negotiated the settlement. Flight attendant law suit 2 min. 50 sec VXtreme video The couple also saw to it that the tobacco industry would pay $46 million for their legal fees and expenses. No money went into plaintiffs' pockets But the settlement included nary a penny for any of the flight attendants who joined the lawsuit.

MIAMI, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Dade County Circuit Court Judge Robert Kaye released an order Friday upholding the $349 million settlement of landmark flight attendants' lawsuit on secondhand smoke, a court spokesman said.

A Florida attorney who represented flight attendants opposed to the $349 million settlement of a secondhand smoke lawsuit against cigarette makers said Friday he would appeal a judge's order upholding the deal. . . "The settlement is unprecedented in giving $300 milion not to the people on whose claims the lawsuit was premised, but to a vague and undefined foundation to be controlled by people yet to be appointed by class counsel," [Eric] Olsen said.

Adversaries for years, lawyers for flight attendants and Big Tobacco stood as temporary allies Monday before the Third District Court of Appeal.. . . Industry lawyer HUGH WHITING, who represents RJ Reynolds and spoke for all the company defendants, reminded the dissenters that the industry has not paid a dime to any individual plaintiff who has brought a suit anywhere in the United States. Appellate JUDGE ROBERT SHEVIN, who led the questioning for the panel, asked if the industry would funnel the $300 million to individuals. "No," Whiting replied

A three-judge panel of the Third District Court of Appeal heard two hours of arguments Monday and will issue its ruling at a later date. If the court upholds the pact, the estimated 10,000 to 60,000 flight attendants in the class will be able to seek compensatory damages in follow-up trials across the country. "The judge (Kaye) was asked to buy a pig in a poke and he bought it," said ALAN MORRISON, an attorney for Public Citizen, the Ralph Nader consumer group in Washington, D.C. He represents five dissident flight attendants.

A Florida appeals court on Monday indefinitely put off ruling on a request by dissenting plaintiffs to scuttle a landmark $349 million settlement of a massive class-action suit involving secondhand tobacco smoke.