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| S P E C I A L | Tobacco Under Attack |
Big tobacco tells its side in airline smoking case
September 22, 1997
Web posted at: 11:33 a.m. EDT (1533 GMT)MIAMI (CNN) -- Tobacco companies were expected to call their first witness Monday in a landmark secondhand smoking case that pits about 60,000 flight attendants against the major tobacco companies.
Tobacco lawyers were expected to call an engineering expert to counter claims by the non-smoking flight attendants that secondhand smoke at work caused their lung cancer, emphysema and other ailments.
At Issue: Non-smoking flight attendants are seeking $5 billion in damages for ailments they say were caused by secondhand smoke on board airplanes. It's the first secondhand smoking case and the largest single damage claim ever to come to trial against the tobacco industry. Experts called by the plaintiffs testified that the ventilation systems on the aircraft jets aggravated the allegedly harmful exposure to cigarette smoke incurred by the flight attendants.
The five cigarette makers and two trade groups in the case were also expected to call witnesses over the next three weeks or so to challenge the medical and statistical studies linking diseases among non-smokers and secondhand smoke.
The case went to trial on June 2 in Miami, after Norma Broin, an American Airlines flight attendant, was diagnosed with lung cancer after more than a decade on the job in 1989. Smoking was banned on domestic U.S. flights in 1990.
"Secondhand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. But the tobacco industries' overall global strategy and tactic was to plant doubt in the minds of the American people ... Does it really?" plaintiff's attorney Stanley Rosenblatt told jurors earlier in the year.
Six jurors and seven alternates heard evidence for more than eight weeks, but were last in court September 8, when the two lawyers suing the tobacco industry on behalf of the flight attendants rested their case, after presenting 50 witnesses -- 30 of them by depositions read to the jury.
Correspondent Robert Vito and Reuters contributed to this report.
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