| Venue: | Ct. App. CA |
| Facts: | Exploding Pinto. Death and horrible burns. Turns out Ford knew about the explody characteristics of their design, and there were memos proposing cheap corrections, but they decided to go ahead anyway. |
| Posture: | Verdict for plaintiffs at trial: Grimshaw gets $2.15M compensatory and $125M punitive; Gray gets $559K compensatory. On Ford's motion for a new trial, Grimshaw has to give back all but $3.5M of the punitives. Both sides appeal, and so do the Grays who would like to seek punitive damages as well. |
| Issue: | Two of them:
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| Holding: |
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| Rule: | "Malice" includes conscious disregard of the rights or safety of others, and punitive damages need to be large enough to deter. |
| Reasoning: | Punitive damages are for the sake of example and for punishing the
defendant. Here we've got a case where regulatory safety standards
did not provide sufficient motivation to make things safe.
This isn't a due process violation (Ford claimed it didn't have "fair warning"). There's a long line of decisions allowing punitive damages for nonintentional torts where there was conscious disregard of safety. And this isn't an ex post facto thing either: that's for criminal cases. Neither is this an unlawful delegation of legislative power: this is straight up common law. As to the amount of damages, it doesn't make sense to compare this case to others. This wasn't malicious conduct targeting an individual: Ford was endangering thousands. Plus, this was only 0.005% of Ford's net worth, or .03% of its 1976 net income. We're trying to deter here! |
| Dicta: | |