$122.5 Million Verdict Against Doctor Who Taped a Hand Grenade to Medical Board Chairman's Spare Tire

On the morning of 4 February 2009, Dr. Trent Pierce walked out of his house in West Memphis, Arkansas and found a spare doughnut tire propped against his car.

He was chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board, and he was on his way to a board hearing. When he moved the tire, an MK3A2 hand grenade duct-taped to it detonated. Investigators later found string embedded in the burned tape, which is how they knew it had been rigged to fire when the tire was disturbed rather than on a timer.

The blast blew two gold teeth out of his mouth. It broke many of his bones and burned him severely. It destroyed the sight in his left eye and the hearing in his left ear.

The hearing he was driving to that morning concerned Dr. Randeep Mann, a Russellville physician. The board had already revoked Mann's authority to prescribe narcotics, and he was under investigation a third time, this time for dispensing controlled substances without prescriptions. In August 2010 a federal jury convicted Mann of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. He is serving life.

The Pierces then sued him in Crittenden County. Because a federal jury had already decided the question of who did it, the circuit court granted the Pierces partial summary judgment on liability using offensive collateral estoppel from the criminal convictions. That left the jury a single job: fix the damages.

On 17 March 2015 it returned four awards totalling $122,500,000, being $17,500,000 in compensatory damages and $105,000,000 in punitive damages, to Dr. Pierce and his wife Melissa. Robert M. Cearley Jr. of the Cearley Law Firm in Little Rock represented them.

Mann appealed, arguing among other things that he should be allowed to relitigate whether he was responsible. On 1 December 2016 the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed, 5 to 2, in Mann v. Pierce, 2016 Ark. 418. The court's answer to the relitigation argument gave the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette its headline: he could not rehash his side.

Arkansas is one of the few states where the full figure survives as a matter of constitutional law. Article 5, Section 32 of the Arkansas Constitution forbids the legislature from limiting recoverable damages, and the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the statutory punitive cap in Bayer CropScience v. Schafer in 2011. Nothing reduced this award, and nothing could have.

What did not follow was payment. Cearley told the Democrat-Gazette he did not expect the Pierces to collect, because Mann is in federal prison for life. The realistic recovery was the proceeds of Mann's seized antique gun collection, valued at somewhere between $1.5 million and $2 million, which a federal judge ordered sold in March 2017.