In what might be the largest verdict
involving a tire blowout, a Los Angeles jury ordered Continental General Tire on
Friday to pay damages of nearly $55.4 million for a defect that caused a
rollover crash that left a young woman a quadriplegic.
After eight days of deliberations, the jury in Los Angeles Superior Court
awarded the damages to Cynthia Lampe, 33, who was paralyzed from the neck down
in the June 1996 crash, and her mother and father. The verdict is believed to be
the largest in history involving tread-separation failure, a danger that came to
prominence last year with the recall of Firestone tires that were implicated in
scores of fatal rollover wrecks.
The verdict, which climaxed a nearly three-month trial, came a day after
another big tire verdict in El Paso, Texas, in which Cooper Tire and Rubber Co.
was ordered pay $9.74 million to the families of four people who died when the
treads peeled from a tire, causing their minivan to flip over.
Lampe and her mother, Sylvia Cortez, expressed joy at the outcome. Lampe
said she was very excited and happy the trial exposed "what General Tire is all
about."
"I'm just very glad that it's finally over," said Cortez, who was also
injured in the accident, though not severely. Her daughter's injuries have had
"a tremendous impact on all of us," Cortez said, "but thank God we're a
close-knit family, and we'll start healing from now on."
Continental General is the U.S. unit of Continental AG of Germany, the
world's fourth-largest tire manufacturer. In a statement issued after the
verdict, the company said it was "deeply disappointed and will appeal."
The company said the 15-inch AmeriTech ST tire that was the focus of the
case was one of 4.6 million it had produced for Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable
cars, had been driven nearly 50,000 miles, and therefore "could not have been
defective."
"Ms. Lampe experienced a tragic accident and we are deeply sympathetic to
her plight," the company said. "But our tire was not the cause of this tragedy."
The verdict may cement Los Angeles' image as a risky place to defend
personal injury cases involving tire and automotive defects. The largest civil
verdict in U.S. history--a $4.9-billion award against General Motors--came in
1999 in a vehicle fire case in Los Angeles Superior Court--an award later
trimmed by the judge to $1.2 billion and now on appeal. Brian Panish, one of the
Lampe lawyers, represented plaintiffs in the GM case.
Despite Friday's award, jurors rejected some of Lampe's case, including
claims that the tire was defectively designed. The jury also refused to award
punitive damages because the tire maker had not acted with malice.
But the panel ruled unanimously that the company had been negligent, and
that the tire contained a manufacturing defect.
The trial "exposed the fact that they had a manufacturing process that put
profits ahead of safety," said Taras Kick, one of the Lampe attorneys.
Bruce Kaster, a Florida lawyer who has handled dozens of tire suits, said
the Lampe case and others have shown that quality controls in many tire plants
are woefully inadequate.
Lampe's lawyers presented damaging testimony from former workers at the
Mount Vernon, Ill., plant where the Lampe tire was made in December 1992.
The workers described intense production pressures and said it was not
unusual for floor sweepings and other contaminants to be dumped in the rubber
mix.
Jurors were also shown a memo by an operations manager at the Mount Vernon
plant. "We are out of control," said the 1993 memo, "and as you can see, it is
not one particular defect, but a conglomeration from every department."
Plaintiffs also produced evidence of severe quality problems involving
tires produced by Continental General for Big O Tires, a major distributor, from
the late 1980s to early '90s.
Lampe was heading to Las Vegas on Interstate 15 when the tread suddenly
separated from her left rear tire. The '93 Ford Taurus veered off the highway
and up an embankment, then flipped over. Lampe, then 28, suffered a broken neck.
Her lawyers argued that contaminants in the tire's rubber weakened the
adhesion between its steel belts, causing them to pull apart and peel the tread
away.
Defense lawyers countered that the tire had been well-made, but had
suffered prior road damage that weakened the bond between the belts. And they
said that despite the blowout, Lampe should have been able to bring the car
under control, and thus was at fault.
The argument, standard in the defense of tire cases, was flatly rejected by
the jury, which refused to assign even 1% of the fault to Lampe.
It was "merely an attempt to shift blame, and it's clearly not reality in
these violent, sudden tread separations," Panish said. "The victims have no
warning or opportunity to prevent loss of control of the vehicle."
All told, the jury awarded nearly $49.9 million in compensatory damages to
Lampe and more than $4.5 million to her mother. Her father Joe Cortez, a
prominent boxing referee, was also awarded $1 million in damages.
Defense lawyer Walter Yoka said the AmeriTech ST tires had a fine safety
record, and that plaintiffs had failed to show that product quality had suffered
from alleged manufacturing lapses. Therefore, he said, such evidence should have
been excluded from the trial.
The plaintiffs previously had reached a $4.09-million settlement with three
other defendants: Ford Motor Co.; a Sears, Roebuck and Co. service center that
had inspected the Taurus before the ill-fated trip; and the dealership that sold
the used car to the Cortez family.