Jeff Watson

Sherri Tramble, 36, was a St. Landry Parish paramedic riding unrestrained in the back of an ambulance, starting an IV on a patient en route to hospital, when a pickup turned across the ambulance's path without yielding. She has multiple skull fractures, a C-7 fracture and a permanent traumatic brain injury, and has since been interdicted.

Jerrod Snearl, 22, was riding in the middle of the front seat of his employer's empty dump truck on the way to a tree-clearing job when the driver swerved on the I-12 overpass at Jefferson Highway in Baton Rouge, the brakes locked, and the truck rode up over the bridge rail and fell about 30 feet onto the bank of Ward's Creek, where it caught fire. The driver burned to death. Snearl, trapped with a broken pelvis, was burned over 51 percent of his body and lost both legs, his penis, a testicle and his spleen. An Iberville Parish jury found the state's bridge rail an unreasonable risk of harm and awarded him $9,352,826.67, which the First Circuit affirmed in 2001 while raising the driver's fault and reallocating it to the state.

On May 10, 1993, three high school students were coming home from school on Sullivan Road in East Baton Rouge Parish when the driver lost control in the Sparkle Drive curve on wet pavement, crossed the centerline and hit a pickup. The driver and one passenger died. The other passenger, 16-year-old Jason Adams, suffered a torn heart valve requiring open-heart surgery, permanent frontal lobe brain damage, a compound leg fracture, a crushed ankle and a fractured pelvis. A jury cleared the Parish, but the trial judge granted judgment notwithstanding the verdict because the Parish had skid tests and citizen complaints showing the road was dangerously slick and had not fixed it. The First Circuit affirmed liability, put 20 percent on the driver, and left the Adams family with $1,622,757.