Kline & Specter's $153 Million Verdict Against Ford in a Fatal Parking-Brake Case

In October 1994, three-year-old Walter White climbed into his family's 1993 Ford F-350 to reach his piggy bank. The pickup sat on a driveway with the parking brake set. The brake did not hold. The truck rolled, Walter fell beneath it, and he died. His parents, Ginny and Jimmie White of Elko, Nevada, sued Ford Motor Company.

The case turned on how the parking brake was built. Inside the mechanism, a part called the pawl was meant to lock against the teeth of a ratchet wheel. In a condition the engineers called "tip-on-tip," the pawl could slip over the tops of the teeth instead of catching, which let a parked truck drift on an incline. Ford had already identified a correction. It cost roughly fifteen cents.

Shanin Specter of Kline & Specter tried the case in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada, in Reno, before Judge David Warner Hagen. The plaintiffs proved a design defect and, just as central, a failure to warn. Evidence showed Ford knew the brake could disengage yet kept selling the trucks. Ford told dealers about the fix but instructed them to install it only if a customer complained. After discussions with federal safety regulators, Ford recalled the affected vehicles, but the recall mailing reached owners after Walter was already dead.

On July 31, 1998, the jury returned $2,305,435 in compensatory damages and $150,884,400 in punitive damages, a total near $153 million. Specter said it was the first major case over the parking-brake defect to reach trial in the country.

The award did not stand untouched. The trial court reduced the punitive figure to about $69 million. On appeal, in White v. Ford Motor Co., 312 F.3d 998 (9th Cir. 2002), a divided panel reversed the punitive judgment and ordered a new trial limited to the amount of punitive damages, holding that the jury had been allowed to punish Ford for conduct outside Nevada. A 2004 retrial set punitive damages at $52 million. In 2007, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that juries may not punish a defendant for harm to people who are not parties to the case, the Ninth Circuit again ordered the punitive amount retried. The findings that Ford was liable and that punishment was warranted were never disturbed.

Ford recalled roughly 884,000 trucks about a month after Walter White died.