Restaurant Related News

Verdict Upheld In Airline Smoke Death

By: Claire Cooper - Bee Legal Affairs Writer
Source: Sacramento Bee
Published: December 13, 2002

SAN FRANCISCO, California -- A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a record-breaking verdict in a secondhand smoke case, telling Olympic Airways to pay $1.4 million to survivors of a Castro Valley man who died during a return flight from Athens, Greece, in 1998.

Fifty-two-year-old Dr. Abid M. Hanson, who had asthma, was seated three rows in front of the plane's smoking section. As he grew sicker and sicker, his wife's increasingly frantic pleas to change his seat were ignored by a flight attendant.

The decision by the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in favor of the Hanson family was but one development in a flurry of related activity this week: Boston on Wednesday became the latest city to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. New York City leaders agreed on terms of a ban that will be almost as sweeping. And another U.S. appeals court resuscitated the environmental report that has provided the scientific basis for all such official moves to reduce indoor tobacco smoke across the nation.

Citing procedural problems, a federal trial judge in Winston-Salem, N.C., the heart of tobacco country, had thrown out the 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report classifying secondhand smoke as a cancer-causing pollutant. On Wednesday, the Virginia based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, by reputation the nation's most conservative federal appellate panel, conceded the importance of tobacco to the regional economy but said the judge's decision had no legal basis.

California prohibited smoking in bars and restaurants statewide by 1998, but the state has no control of airplanes. A smoking ban for flights to or from the United States wasn't passed until two years ago -- two years too late for Hanson.

The cause of his death was disputed because no autopsy was performed. Olympic contended he "had a heart attack and he just happened to die on our aircraft," Andrew Harakas, the airline's lawyer, said Thursday.

However, U.S. Distrtict Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco concluded in 2000 that Hanson died because Olympic attendant Maria Leptourgou refused to change his seat and then "deliberately closed her eyes to the probable consequences to her acts."

The 9th Circuit saw no reason to overturn Breyer's findings.

The circuit court also upheld Breyer's application of the Warsaw Convention. That international air travel treaty caps awards for most injuries at $75,000, but the sky's the limit in cases of willful airline misconduct.

The decision by the 9th Circuit, reputedly the most liberal of the nation's 12 regional appeals courts, was written by Donald W. Molloy, a federal trial judge from Montana serving as a substitute appellate judge. Circuit Judges Stephen Reinhardt of Los Angeles and Raymond Fisher of Pasadens also signed the opinion.

Harakas said he'll study it and talk to Olympic before deciding whether to seek further review in the courts.

Gerald Sterns, who represents Hanson's widow, Rubina Husain, said the family was "gratified that the legal system existed" to redress their horrifying experience.