We appreciate the Daily Journal's report on
the $55 million verdict against DaimlerChrysler Corporation recovered
by the family of Richard Mraz in the March 16 edition of Verdicts and
Settlements.
The case is significant because the defect at issue that caused the
death of Mraz affects over a million vehicles on the road today, including
1988 to 2003 Dodge Dakota pickup trucks and 1993-1998 Jeep Grand Cherokees.
DaimlerChrysler's response in the Daily Journal was to continue
to blame Mraz for the accident. This is precisely the kind of blame game
the jury found an inadequate answer to a serious public safety threat.
DaimlerChrysler's ongoing indifference to public safety was what prompted
the jury to find that DaimlerChrysler acted with malice and with a conscious
disregard for the health and safety of others.
Mraz was not the first person to die from this defect, but likely the
13th person. There have been hundreds of accidents where people suffered
debilitating physical injuries when the DaimlerChrysler vehicles they
were driving moved into reverse when the driver believed that he or she
had placed the shift selector of the vehicle in the park position.
Rather than acknowledge the fact of the defect, the DaimlerChrysler
spokesperson advised the Daily Journal that DaimlerChrysler's in-house
investigators concluded Mraz exited the vehicle while it was in reverse
and apparently equated the alleged defect with what turned out to be
false reports of spontaneous acceleration in Audi vehicles in the 1980s.
At trial, the eyewitness testimony was that Mraz was out of the vehicle
and several feet away from the vehicle when the vehicle started to move
in reverse. The evidence also showed that if the vehicle had been placed
in reverse, it would have begun to move immediately; if Mraz had put
the vehicle in reverse, there would be no way Mraz could be out of the
vehicle and several feet away when the vehicle began to move.
Plaintiffs showed that a driver can place the vehicle into what appears
to be the park position and the vehicle remains stationary for several
seconds and sometimes longer - even after the driver removes his foot
from the brake and exits the vehicle. From this position, the vehicle
can have a dangerous delayed engagement of powered reverse, and, in the
case of Richard Mraz, the vehicle ran over him once he had exited the
vehicle.
The evidence plaintiffs presented at trial included the fact that DaimlerChrysler
was aware of well over 1,000 park-to-reverse complaints in several of
their vehicles with the same defective transmission. Further, when DaimlerChrysler
finally determined that it had to do something about the problem in 2000
because of the ongoing [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration]
investigation of the Dodge Dakota truck, it engaged in an inexpensive
recall that DaimlerChrysler's engineers knew and testified would not
fix the problem. Indeed, in addition to finding that the vehicle was
defective, the jury also found that DaimlerChrysler was negligent in
failing to adequately recall or retrofit the Dodge Dakota that killed
Mraz.
DaimlerChrysler had 20 years to fix the park-to-reverse transmission
defect in the Dodge Dakota that lead to Mraz's death in 2004. Refusing
to act as a responsible corporate citizen and falsely blaming Mraz for
his own death explains why the jury imposed $50 million in punitive damages
against DaimlerChrysler. |
