A Georgia jury awarded over $2.5 billion to the survivors of a couple who were killed in 2022 when their Ford Super Duty pickup rolled over. It’s a record award to come a Georgia court and one of the highest affecting an automaker in the U.S. Headlight.News has more.
The crash involved a prior-generation Ford F-250 Super Duty pickup.
Debra Mills was driving a Ford Super Duty pickup in Decatur County, Georgia on August 22, 2022 when it struck a driveway drainage culvert, sending the truck airborne for more than 80 feet. It ultimately came down, rolling onto its roof which collapsed and killed both the 64-year-old Mills and her husband, 74-year-old Herman Mills.
A jury in Columbus, Georgia has now awarded more than $2.5 billion to the couple’s family, concluding that the vehicle should not have suffered that sort of damage and that the collapse was the cause of their death.
For its part, Ford countered that the crash itself was caused by the driver, adding that the crushed roof was not the cause of the couple’s death. It has indicated it plans to appeal. A large number of such awards are either reversed upon appeal or as part of a subsequent settlement agreement, legal experts note.
Ford offers sympathy – but expected to appeal
Ford argued the two fatalities were not caused by the crushed roof.
The case resulted in one of the largest individual awards ever in an automotive wrongful death suit, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calling it a record for the state of Georgia. But the accident occurred just days after another jury in the state awarded $1.7 billion in a similar case involving Ford. That briefly had been a Georgia record.
“While our sympathies go out to the…family, the verdict is impermissibly extreme and not supported by the evidence,” stated a Ford spokesperson.
During trial, Ford’s attorney asserted the crash itself was the result of driver who, they argued, suffered a heart attack before striking the drainage culvert. She died on the scene but it took 26 minutes to pry her husband out of the pickup because of the collapsed roof, police reported. He was subsequently transported to a Florida hospital where he later died.
The verdict
As is often the case in such cases, the jury was asked to assign fault, determining that Ford was 85% responsible, Debra Mills assigned the other 15% of the blame.
In turn, damages were rendered in two phases, $30.5 million being awarded as compensatory damages, another $2.5 billion as punitive damages.
The jury rendered the verdict in two phases, one for compensatory damages on Thursday awarding $30.5 million and the other for punitive damages on Friday awarding the other $2.5 billion.
It marked a Georgia record, surpassing he $1.7 billion verdict Ford faced as a result of another wrongful death crash involving a Super Duty model. Voncile and Melvin were killed in that rollover which occurred in 2014, the subsequent court case concluded in August 2022.
In both cases, James E. Butler served as lead attorney for the families filing suit.
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What next?
Ford has yet to say how it now plans to proceed, though it is extremely rare to see a company fail to appeal wrongful death and product liability verdicts, experts said, especially one so large.
In one of the most famous liability cases, where a McDonald’s customer sued after being badly scalded by spilled coffee, a jury in 1994 awarded $120,000 in compensatory medical damages. But they also gained notoriety by adding $2.7 million – worth more than double that today due to inflation – in punitive damages. That ultimately was reduced to $640,000 by the trial judge. And the two sides settled for an undisclosed amount before an appeal was decided.
Large punitive awards have resulted in pushback by lawmakers in a number of states. And Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has proposed setting limits on some potential awards. But the case involving the Mills family would not be impacted as it was filed in federal court.
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