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Jury Awards Ford SUV Rollover Victim $152 Million
A jury in Alabama has awarded $152 million to a 24-year-old man paralyzed in a rollover crash in 2015, Reuters reports.
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A jury in Alabama has awarded $152 million to a 24-year-old man paralyzed in a rollover crash in 2015, Reuters reports.
The jury agreed with the plaintiff’s lawyer that the 1998 Explorer SUV he was riding in didn’t meet Ford Motor Co.’s own safety guidelines. It awarded Travaris Smith $100 million in punitive damages and $52 million in compensatory damaged.
The plaintiff’s attorneys asserted that Ford engineers had advised a change in the model’s suspension after testing the vehicle, but Ford instead destroyed documentation about the results and changed the test procedure.
Ford, which plans to appeal, complains that the court blocked the company’s efforts to present evidence in its own defense.
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