Flight attendant loses second-hand smoke verdict

A Florida state jury on Tuesday ruled against a flight attendant who claimed her chronic sinusitis was caused by exposure to cigarette smoke on airplanes, attorneys in the case said on Tuesday.

The six-person jury answered “no” to the only question it posed to it, which was whether the second-hand smoke was the legal cause of Lorraine Swaty’s sinus condition, Steven Hunter, one of her attorneys, said.The trial, which began April 26, concerned one of thousands of individual lawsuits brought by flight attendants in Florida following a 1997 settlement of a class-action lawsuit on the same issue.That settlement allowed individual flight attendants to sue for compensatory damages, but not punitive damages.Defendants in the case included Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA unit, Loews Corp.’s Lorillard unit and Reynolds American Inc.’s R.J. Reynolds and Brown & Williams units.The tobacco companies had argued that Swaty’s sinusitis did not begin until 1994, six years after Congress banned smoking on domestic flights of two hours or less. But Hunter said that Swaty first developed the condition in 1988 and that the disease was the result of years of exposure to smoke.”The jury decided this case on the facts, and the facts simply did not entitle the plaintiff to recover damages,” said William S. Ohlemeyer, Philip Morris USA’S vice president and associate general counsel.Swaty’s is the eighth flight attendant case to go to trial since 2001. Juries have ruled in favor of the tobacco industry in six of those cases and against the industry in one case. Another case ended in a mistrial in May 2002 and was subsequently dismissed. (Source: Reuters Health, May 2005)