$296 Million Bronco Rollover Verdict Against Ford, Paid Out at $23.7 Million After Four Years of Appeals

On June 20, 1993, the Romo family was traveling in their 1978 Ford Bronco when 19-year-old Juan Romo, at the wheel, swerved to avoid a van and the vehicle rolled. The Bronco's roof gave way in the rollover: the steel portion over the front seats collapsed and the fiberglass top over the rear shattered. Juan's father Ramon, 39, his mother Salustia, 40, and his brother Ramiro, 18, were all killed. Juan and his two younger sisters survived their injuries and were left orphans.

Joseph W. Carcione Jr., the Redwood City trial lawyer who had built his own plaintiffs' practice on the Peninsula since 1981, took the case for Juan Romo, working with Gerald Okimoto of his office and San Diego attorney Gary Dolinski, while Stockton's Lawrence Drivon represented the surviving sisters. Their theory was that Ford knew the 1978 Bronco's roof could not survive a rollover. The company had specifications calling for a stronger roof, chose not to meet them, and reinforced the roof with steel only on later models. Carcione put it more bluntly, arguing Ford knew the vehicle would crush flat as a pancake in a rollover and sold it anyway. The unified trial ran from March through July of 1999 before Judge Roger Beauchesne in Stanislaus County Superior Court. After about a week of deliberations the jury awarded $6,226,793 in compensatory damages, then added $290 million in punitive damages, at the time one of the largest punitive awards an American jury had ever returned against an automaker. Carcione later said some jurors had wanted to assess a billion dollars or more, and that $290 million was the compromise.

The number then began a four-year journey through the courts. In September 1999 Judge Beauchesne granted Ford a new trial on punitive damages, finding the deliberations may have been tainted by juror misconduct: one juror had described a nightmare about rolling Broncos and burning children, and another had brought up a television news segment on Ford safety. He also trimmed the compensatory award to just under $5 million. In June 2002 the Fifth District Court of Appeal reversed the new trial order and reinstated the full $290 million in Romo v. Ford Motor Co. (2002) 99 Cal.App.4th 1115, with Erwin Chemerinsky joining Carcione's team on the appeal. Ford went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and timing decided the case. In April 2003 the high court handed down State Farm v. Campbell, sharply limiting the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages, then vacated the Romo decision and sent it back. On remand, in Romo v. Ford Motor Co. (2003) 113 Cal.App.4th 738, the Court of Appeal ordered the punitive award reduced to $23,723,287, roughly three times the individual plaintiffs' compensatory damages plus additional sums for the estates of the family members who died. The plaintiffs accepted the remittitur, and in January 2004 Ford announced it would pay rather than fight on. What the family actually recovered was the reduced punitive award plus the compensatory damages and interest, a real but far smaller number than the verdict that made headlines.

A word about whose case this is. Romo was tried by Joe Carcione Jr., who founded the practice and retired after decades of trial work. The firm that carries his name today, Carcione, Henderson & Markowitz, is the successor to that office, and its current partners did not try this case; Joshua Markowitz joined the Carcione firm in 1999, the year of the verdict, and was not yet a lawyer. The verdict is the founder's landmark, and it is part of the firm's lineage rather than the current partners' own trial record. It remains a defining Bronco rollover case: a jury's finding that Ford knowingly sold a vehicle with a roof that could not protect the people inside, followed by an appellate era that would never again let a number like $290 million stand.