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Top court to hear Linert case
YOUNGSTOWN
The Ohio Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal arising from a civil case concerning an Austintown police officer who was seriously injured in a fiery, high-speed, rear-end crash caused by a drunken driver.
The Ford Motor Co. filed the appeal. Ford was the maker of the 2005 Crown Victoria police cruiser the officer was driving at the time of the crash.
In July 2011, a jury ruled in favor of Ford in a $19 million lawsuit filed against Ford by former Officer Ross J. Linert and his wife, Brenda.
The lawsuit alleged the officer was badly burned because of defects in the cruiser.
Ford maintained it made a safe vehicle that it characterized as “the police car of choice.”
Ford is appealing a 7th District Court of Appeals finding that visiting Judge Thomas P. Curran, who presided over the trial, erred by failing to instruct the jury concerning Ford’s duty to inform customers it had increased the thickness of the metal-crimp overlap, where gasoline is sent from the fuel tank to the engine, in 2007 to make the cruiser more crash-worthy.
That interpretation of Ford’s duty to warn customers “would impose an unreasonable and confusing burden upon product manufacturers, and it would have a chilling effect on a manufacturer’s efforts to improve its products,” Ford argued in its appeal to the state’s top court.
“A product manufacturer’s implementation of a post-marketing product improvement does not trigger a post-marketing duty to warn,” Ford added.
The Linerts had argued in the trial the thinness of the crimp in Linert’s cruiser caused the unit that sent fuel to its engine to dislodge in the crash and leak the fuel that caused the fire that burned Linert.
In a criminal case, Adrien Foutz, of Girard, pleaded no contest to aggravated vehicular assault and was found guilty. She served 19 months in prison after driving a two-ton Cadillac at 115 mph into the rear of the cruiser Linert was driving at 35 mph.
The crash occurred at 1:08 a.m., Nov. 11, 2007, on North Meridian Road under Interstate 680.
Foutz’s blood-alcohol level was 0.279 – more then three times the legal limit.
The Linerts reached an undisclosed pretrial settlement with Foutz in the civil case.