Hernando County Jury Awards $330 Million in DUI Wrongful Death of 13-Year-Old

On the evening of April 12, 2007, Christopher Marcone was driving his Dodge pickup truck through a residential neighborhood in eastern Hernando County, Florida, with a blood alcohol level of .207 -- more than twice the legal limit. He ran a stop sign and plowed into the right side of a minivan. Riding in that van was a 13-year-old girl traveling with her grandparents. She died the following day.

Marcone pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter and three related charges and was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The criminal conviction settled his personal fate, but it left the girl's mother, Angela Stone, with no legal avenue for accountability inside the criminal system. She turned to the civil courts.

C. Steven Yerrid of The Yerrid Law Firm in Tampa took the case knowing that collecting on any judgment would be a long shot. Marcone was incarcerated and had no meaningful assets. Yerrid told reporters after the verdict that Stone had understood from the outset that financial recovery from Marcone was highly improbable. She brought the case for a different reason: to force a jury to confront what a night of reckless drinking cost her family.

At trial, Yerrid presented the circumstances of the crash and the magnitude of Stone's loss to the Hernando County jury. Jurors assessed $55 million in compensatory damages and then added $275 million in punitive damages, for a total award of $330 million. The six-woman jury deliberated less than an hour before returning the verdict on September 30, 2009.

The award was reported at the time as the largest wrongful death verdict in Florida and among the largest of its kind in the country. No appellate decision reducing or vacating the verdict has been identified in subsequent public records. Because Marcone remained imprisoned with no assets, the practical value of the judgment to Stone was symbolic -- a formal accounting, by 12 jurors, of what her daughter's life was worth.