Originally Posted by lhrsfo

I'm not sure it would be the civil courts. As I understand it, passengers must follow crew member instructions and can be arrested if they don't. It's presumably an arrestable offence, therefore, to take your handbaggage with you on evacuation. If someone dies because you were in the process of committing an arrestable offence (and one where it is very foreseeable that such would be the result of your actions), I could well imagine a US prosecutor going for murder as the charge.