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• Jury clears Big Tobacco in former flight attendant's illness 

"There wasn't a lot of evidence that the cigarette smoke made her sick," said juror Melvin Raul Galeano, explaining the six-member panel's decision not to award Marie Fontana any money. . .

Claiming scientific evidence was on his side, tobacco lawyer Jonathan Engram said the industry would vigorously pursue every one of the 3,100 additional cases . . .

"For the most part they are frivolous lawsuits involving chronic sinusitis cases," said Engram, who represented R.J. Reynolds. . .

Galeano said he and other jurors would have liked to have heard Fontana's treating physician take the witness stand and tell them that she has emphysema or some other disease specifically caused by secondhand cigarette smoke that clogged the airline cabins she worked in for 26 years. . .

During about five hours of deliberations, the jurors pored over medical records looking for any indication from Fontana's doctors that she had emphysema or chronic bronchitis, both of which her lawyers said contributed to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

They could not find it, Galeano said. . .

Fontana's lawyers showed the jury what had once been a secret industry memo regarding secondhand smoke in airplane cabins.

The memo, called an "action plan," instructed industry officials to shift focus from the build-up of smoke in cabins and its possible dangers and toward the efficiency of ventilation systems in the aircraft.

"The tobacco companies have done terrible things, but that doesn't necessarily prove that secondhand smoke was the cause of this woman's disease," said Joseph Daly, a law professor at Hamline University Law School in Minnesota.

"And that has been the problem in all these tobacco cases historically," said Daly, who has followed tobacco litigation since a class-action case in that state prompted the release of many secret and damaging industry documents that are now used in most cigarette cases.

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