Friday, December 30, 2016
COLUMBUS
In a 5-2 decision, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld a jury verdict in favor of the Ford Motor Co. in a lawsuit filed against Ford by a former Austintown police officer, who was seriously injured in a fiery, high-speed, rear-end crash caused by a drunken driver.
Former officer Ross J. Linert, and his wife, Brenda, filed the $19 million civil lawsuit against the automaker in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.
Ford made the 2005 Crown Victoria police cruiser the officer was driving in the 1:08 a.m. Nov. 11, 2007, crash on North Meridian Road under Interstate 680.
The complaint alleged the officer was badly burned because of defects in the cruiser, about which the Linerts said Ford had a duty to inform the officer.
Ford maintained it made a safe vehicle that it characterized as “the police car of choice,” and the trial jury ruled in favor of Ford in July 2011.
The Youngstown-based 7th District Court of Appeals found 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.
After Ford appealed that decision, the state’s top court ruled that Judge Curran properly refused to instruct the jury on the post-market duty of manufacturers to warn customers of defects in products that are not discovered until after the product has been sold.
Ford had maintained: “A product manufacturer’s implementation of a post-marketing product improvement does not trigger a post-marketing duty to warn.”
The top court ruled that there was a “paucity of evidence” presented in the trial that, after selling the cruiser to the police department, Ford had gained additional knowledge of the likelihood of a risk of harm to cruiser users.
The Linerts had argued in the trial that the thinness of the crimp in Linert’s cruiser caused the unit that sent the 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 2-ton Cadillac at 115 mph into the rear of the cruiser Linert was driving at 35 mph.
Foutz’s blood alcohol content was 0.279 – more than three times the legal limit.
The Linerts reached an undisclosed pretrial settlement with Foutz in the civil case.