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An English translation of the article is posted below.

ASH PRESS RELEASE: Executives Guilty of Manslaughter for Passive Smoking Death

Bank Managers Sentenced to Three Months in Jail and to Pay Large Fine
Decision Opens Door to Civil Wrongful Death Action For Huge Damages

  Two executives have been convicted of criminal manslaughter for causing the death of a 35-year-old female bank worker who suffered a fatal asthmatic attack from exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke on the job.
  They were sentenced to spend three months in jail, and to pay a fine of 50,000 Euros.  The decision also opens the door for a civil wrongful death law suit by her heirs to recover damages for causing her death by smoke.
  The nonsmoking employee was an asthmatic who was reportedly forced to work in a poorly ventilated room surrounded by smokers.  Her repeated requests to be moved to a nonsmoking area were rejected by her employer.
  "This is apparently the first situation in which people were held to be criminally liable for causing the death of someone by subjecting them to secondhand tobacco smoke," says law professor John Banzhaf, Executive Director of Action on Smoking and Health, a national antismoking organization.
  However, there are a growing number of situations in which employers have been held liable for causing or exacerbating medical problems in nonsmokers by forcing them to be subjected to tobacco smoke pollution, so this is simply the next logical extension of the trend, he says.
  Moreover, in a number of similar situations, those responsible have been held liable for the civil tort of battery.  Since battery, unlike simple negligence, is an intentional tort, a court could impose punitive damages as well as the damages ordinarily awarded when a death is caused by accident.
  The crime of "manslaughter" includes causing the death of another by conduct which recklessly disregards a known risk, and the risk that tobacco smoke can cause everything from an episode of asthma to a heart attack in becoming increasingly well known, argues Banzhaf.
  The Centers for Disease Control [CDC] estimate that secondhand tobacco smoke kills more than 60,000 Americans each year — a number larger than those killed by motor vehicle accidents.  A significant number of these deaths are caused by smoking in the workplace, according to ASH.

Two managers condemned for the death of one of their employees
MILAN Crime: voluntary manslaughter; sentence: three months of jail with conditional sentence; reason: they did not protect from the consequences of passive smoke an employee that suffered from asthma.

In this way the process to two bank managers of the French bank Paribas, accused of the death of one of their employees has ended. Monica C. was 35 years old, had a husband of the same age and a 10 year old child. In September of '99, she had a particularly violent asthma attack: she was taken to the hospital, the medications didn't help and she died.

Since she was young, she suffered from "poliallergic asthma": a disease that had made her an invalid for life and that helped her get the job at the Milan branch of Paribas. The first job was in an office and everything seemed fine. The problems started when the woman gets transferred to the reception desk of the bank, with the task of directing calls.

The husband tells the journalists: "She would tell me that the office was full of cigarette smoke and without enough air filtration. She was getting worse every day that passed: various times, in the months before she died, I had to take her to the emergency room and often, during the night, she had to wake up and inhale her asthma spray.

Monica C. had asked to be relocated from that unhealthy and extremely dangerous office. Along with her requests she would attach medical certificates that would prove her gradual health deterioration. The requests were not effective.

One of the two guilty managers had justified himself saying that he was aware of the discomfort of the woman, but had never been informed that her health conditions were so bad. On the other hand, according to the prosecutors, she was known to having gotten her job because of her disability [i.e., under a special program to encourage the hiring of the disabled].

Nevertheless she had been exposed "to a risk so obviously and notoriously incompatible with her disease." As major evidence in the trial, yesterday, there was also a medical research that highlighted that passive smoke is "recognized by the international medical community as a cause of violent asthma crises."

This research was contested by the defense that instead declared that there is no link between smoke and the death of the woman, and that instead it may have been caused by an allergic crisis of a different kind.