Jump to full article: Law.com, 2008-01-07
Author: Tresa Baldas / Staff reporter
Intro: The tobacco industry, however, has escaped liability in 10 of 11 suits — the bulk of those involving actions filed by flight attendants — since 2001.
Last month, the industry racked up its latest victory in a series of lawsuits involving flight attendants who alleged that they developed cancer due to secondhand smoke on airplanes. The case was filed by a mother who claimed that her flight-attendant daughter developed lung cancer and died due to exposure to secondhand smoke on airplanes. Menchini v. R.J. Reynolds, No. 2000-20916-CA-01 (Miami-Dade Co., Fla., Cir. Ct.).
The Menchini case was the ninth flight-attendant case to go to trial since 2001. Juries have ruled in favor of the tobacco industry in seven of those cases, although a judge ordered a new trial in one of those cases. Another went against the industry, and yet another ended in a mistrial and was eventually dismissed.
"We are seeing increased victories . . . but the tobacco companies are the defendants here and they are certainly much more vigorous in their defense tactics than the defendants in the other types of secondhand smoke lawsuits," said Edward Sweda Jr., a senior attorney with the Tobacco Products Liability Project . . .
There are potentially hundreds more flight-attendant lawsuits awaiting trial, many of them stemming from a 1997 class action settlement that gave about 60,000 flight attendants the right to sue tobacco companies individually, Sweda noted. Broin v. Philip Morris, 641 So.2d 888 (Fla. 3d Ct. App.).
One Weston, Fla., law firm alone, Weinstein & Weinstein, has more than 300 flight-attendant cases still pending. . . .
Benjamine Reid of Tampa, Fla.-based Carlton Fields' Miami office, who was the lead lawyer for R.J. Reynolds and Brown & Williamson in the Menchini case, said the flight-attendant cases are not about whether second-hand smoke causes illness. Rather the question is: Does secondhand smoke cause illness in a particular environment, in this case an airplane?
The answer is no, said Reid, who convinced the jury in the Menchini case that the amount of smoke in the aircraft was not enough to make someone sick, "and there are a number of studies to support this conclusion."
Jump to full article » |