Flight Attendant Loses Secondhand Smoke Lawsuit in Florida

Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc. and other U.S. cigarette makers won a Florida lawsuit brought by a former flight attendant who said secondhand smoke had given her cancer, the companies said Tuesday.

A Miami jury decided the cigarette makers weren’t responsible for plaintiff Gail Routh’s lung cancer. The former US Airways Group Inc. flight attendant, a nonsmoker who was seeking millions of dollars in damages, is expected to die within two years from the illness, witnesses said.

The case was the latest brought by a flight attendant to go to trial in Florida under a 1997 settlement. The tobacco industry agreed to pay $350 million to settle class-action claims of flight attendants suffering from cancer and respiratory illnesses. The accord allowed thousands of attendants to bring individual cases.

Routh, 54, flew for Allegheny Airlines and later US Airways from 1972 to 1999. She experienced “tens of thousands” of hours of secondhand smoke before 1996, when the airline banned smoking on all flights, her lawyers say. She worked on domestic and international flights until she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999. She had surgery in December 2002 to remove two-thirds of her right lung, her lawyer, Stuart Silver, told the jury. Routh also claimed she suffered from chronic sinusitis and chronic bronchitis.

Attorneys for the cigarette makers, which also include British American Tobacco’s Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., have contended that there was no evidence that secondhand smoke caused Routh’s cancer or other health problems.

“Jurors are increasingly seeing through the transparent body of evidence in these types of cases,” said Ronald Milstein, vice president and general counsel for Loews Corp.’s Lorillard Tobacco Co., another defendant cleared in the case.

Of the handful of cases to proceed since the 1997 settlement, only one plaintiff has won, with a Miami jury awarding $5.5 million. A trial judge reduced that award to $500,000. The Routh case is the first lung cancer case to go to trial under the accord, which itself provided no payments to the individual flight attendants.

Also on Tuesday, R.J. Reynolds asked an Illinois appellate court to postpone a “light” cigarette trial until the state’s highest court decides Philip Morris USA’s appeal of a $10.1-billion judgment in a similar case.

Reynolds, seeking to avoid a multibillion-dollar legal judgment against it, argued the trial would be wasted should the state Supreme Court throw out the verdict against Philip Morris. The high court has agreed to hear Philip Morris’ appeal of the verdict for smokers who claimed they were misled about the health risks of light cigarettes.

Philip Morris, the largest U.S. cigarette maker, has argued that the judgment threatened to drive it into bankruptcy. The question before the three-judge appellate panel in Mount Vernon, Ill., is whether the case against R.J. Reynolds raised issues similar to those in the Philip Morris case.

Shares of Philip Morris parent Altria Group Inc. climbed 10 cents to $45 on the New York Stock Exchange. R.J. Reynolds edged up 14 cents to $42.66, and Loews rose 56 cents to $42.98.