Schumer Demands Crown Vic Recall

 

 

All year long, the stories trickle in, to be seen in your local newspaper or occasionally exploited on television: this or that allegation or judgment for safety shortcomings against one of the auto companies, usually Ford or Chrysler, rarely GM and almost never an import.

 

My observation — bias if you will — is that this is a result of very skillful news manipulation by professional public relations folks employed by plaintiff lawyers who are hoping juries will be brainwashed into believing the worst about auto companies, to the end result of box-car punitive damages. Plaintiff lawyers labor not for fees but rather for gargantuan shares of any proceeds, a calculated gamble. The result is a lottery in which the stakes are huge and justice, in my view, is rarely served.

 

The stakes are so high that the entire civil judiciary system has been tainted. Multimillionaire lawyers make large political contributions to elect judges favorable to their cases. Insurance companies, who have to shell out when cases are lost, naturally try to elect judges favorable to defendants.

 

Plaintiff lawyers claim the system helps the poor, but mostly it just enriches the lawyers (and, sometimes, corrupt judges). Several years ago, a Michigan Appeals Court judge, prominent in one party’s politics, solicited a bribe from a plaintiff attorney suing Ford Motor Company. The honest lawyer reported the solicitation with the result the judge committed suicide just before his arrest. It is perhaps wrong to generalize from a particular, but this certainly is an example of how the money drives out the justice.

 

Let’s get to a litany, in no particular order, of automotive product liability lawsuits reported over recent months.

 

During the Christmas holidays (yes, I’m old-fashioned and refuse to be politically correct), U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York released a letter he had sent to Ford demanding the company equip, for free of course, all Crown Victoria taxis with an optional protective shield against rear-end crash fuel-fed fires. This followed the death of a taxi driver in such a crash. I wish Sen. Schumer had first read my TCC report two years ago on this subject. The essence of it was, such crashes are extremely rare, Fords are actually less likely than other cars to be dangerous in such circumstances, and there is no design that can protect against all possible collisions. The newspaper story stated 18 police officers had been killed in such accidents, without noting this covered a period of more than 20 years. The senator’s heart may have been in the right place, but his brain wasn’t. Or maybe his staff didn’t dig deep enough or asked the wrong people.

 

In the Windy City, a jury awarded $27 million to the family of a ’96 Ford Escort driver who was killed when his car, stopped at an intersection, was rear-ended by a Cadillac going 60 mph. The claim was that the seat was defective. The intoxicated Cadillac driver earlier had been sentenced to six years in prison. Let’s see, for just what speed and mass of bullet vehicle should seats be designed? No doubt the man’s family wanted revenge, if not compensation beyond that provided by insurance. Ford has deep pockets, so why not sue?

 

The preceding suit was one of a several around the country claiming seat defects in severe crashes. In a Nashville case, DaimlerChrysler was ordered to pay $105.5 million for the death of a baby strapped in the rear of a minivan that was rear-ended; in this case, an occupied front seat bent rearward, with the passenger impacting the infant. In a Georgia case, Ford was assessed $47.7 million when a rear-seat-belted six-year-old was paralyzed in a head-on collision; the claim was the seat-back latch failed allowing the seat back to move forward, causing the injury. In both cases, plaintiff lawyers claimed the auto companies had known the seats were “defective” and ignored fixing them.

 

A Memphis, Tenn., judge shot down Chrysler’s appeal against a $48.8 million punitive judgment assessed by a jury in a case in which the plaintiff lawyer contended a Dodge minivan was defective because an off-center head-on crash resulted in fatal injuries to the Caravan’s occupants. The punitive damages were in addition to compensatory damages of $9.5 million already awarded. A Jeep Cherokee whose driver had fallen asleep hit the 2000 Caravan. The claim was, in effect, that Chrysler was negligent for not designing and testing for any conceivable collision, regardless of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards or the impossibility of foreseeing every finite possibility. Standards call for dead-on head-ons testing. Uh, so is that every inch of offset crash, every half-inch, or what that Chrysler instead should have tested for? Only a jury – and an appeals court judge - has the expertise to make that decision, right? If the judgment sticks after further appeals, the plaintiff lawyer may pocket up to 50% of the award or $29 million, before expenses of course, with the plaintiffs getting the other half. It won’t bring the victims back to life, but you can bet the lawyer’s share could help elect friendly judges.

 

In a case tried in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., a jury found Ford negligent and awarded (a mere) $3.3 million to the survivor of a young woman who died of injuries following what was alleged to be a low-speed (9 mph, it was claimed, but heaven knows how that conclusion was reached absent a black box) crash into a concrete wall, triggering the air bags in her ’96 Taurus.

 

Growing out of the Ford/Firestone tire recall hullabaloo several years ago, there have been many cases tried claiming that defective Ford designs caused rollover crashes and resulting injuries. In three rollover cases, related only in that consortiums of plaintiff lawyers exchange information, judgments of $30.5 million in Texas, $61 million in Florida, and $42 million in Texas were rendered by juries against Ford. The vehicles involved were an Expedition, an F-150 pickup, and only one an Explorer, the latter being widely condemned after the recalls. The Expedition case claimed the defect was weak side glass that allowed a belted passenger to be partially ejected in a rollover. The plaintiff lawyer, a frequent adversary of the company, was quoted saying, “Ford Motor Co. has ignored the safety of its consumers for over 30 years.” In the pickup case, it was claimed the roof was weak and the belt designed allowed slack — but there was no way of determining whether a belt had been worn by the victim or not. The Explorer case blamed the vehicle because the driver lost control after running off the side of the road and over-correcting, the usual cause of rollovers, regardless of make.

 

On the other hand, Ford has won a couple of suits. It is rare to read about the wins by an auto company because certainly the plaintiff lawyers don’t promote it and the companies don’t like to gloat because of the always-tragic loss of life or serious injury. In any event, a West Virginia jury ruled in Ford’s favor in an Explorer rollover case, and an Oklahoma jury likewise found Ford blameless in a case involving an Expedition crash. In the latter case, the plaintiffs claimed a faulty bearing in the left front wheel caused the driver to lose control and run head-on into a pickup truck pulling a house trailer.

 

Chrysler also prevailed in a Georgia suit alleging the air bag in a Dodge Ram truck malfunctioned — because the plaintiff hadn’t allowed Chrysler engineers to inspect the vehicle. Still, the company had to go all the way up to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a $250,000 verdict.

 

Finally, there’s an old suit in California against Honda that just doesn’t seem to go away. The original suit alleged a faulty seat belt latch allowed a passenger to be severely injured in a ’93 Civic rollover crash. The plaintiff lawyers charged that Honda’s expert witness, while inspecting the vehicle, had removed evidence (?) the belt had been latched. Eventually an out of court settlement was reached — the victim was paraplegic and defense lawyers hate to go before a jury with such a plaintiff — and the case was sealed, as is customary in such settlements. But that didn’t satisfy the Center for Auto Safety, which is intertwined with the plaintiff lawyer bar, and the Nader-founded group brought a new suit to open the records. Presumably this was both to attack the expert witness, who according to Automotive News frequently appears for the defense in auto cases, and to establish a precedent for prying loose private auto company records for use by other plaintiff lawyers.

 

Note that many of these cases would not have reached court if crash data recorders, a.k.a. black boxes, had been installed. Also note that the modus operandi of plaintiff lawyers is to argue alternative causes of crashes, arguments that would be laughed out of the room by auto engineers and unbiased safety experts. Finally, most if not all the cases cited above either have gone on to further appeals or have been settled out of court for undisclosed sums that likely are far less than the newspapers had reported the juries awarding.