Memphis Jury Awards Tanker Driver $3.7 Million After I-55 Rear-End Truck Crash
Won by Greer Injury Lawyers.
A Shelby County jury awarded tanker driver Donriel Borne $3,705,000 after a Celadon tractor-trailer rear-ended him in stopped construction-zone traffic on Interstate 55, and the case later set the standard Tennessee appellate courts use to review a reduced verdict.
What happened
On July 1, 2009, three tractor-trailers collided on Interstate 55 in Memphis. Donriel A. Borne had brought his rig, a tanker he used to haul chemicals, to a stop in a construction zone. A Celadon Trucking Services tractor-trailer driven by Harold Foster rear-ended him. Moments later a third truck, owned by Chickasaw Container Services, struck the Celadon truck from behind.
Borne, who was stopped and had done nothing to cause the crash, suffered back and neck injuries. In June 2010 he filed a personal-injury suit in Shelby County Circuit Court, naming Celadon and Chickasaw and seeking $5 million in compensatory damages.
R. Sadler Bailey and Thomas R. Greer represented Borne. Their investigation pointed to Celadon as the at-fault truck and concluded that Chickasaw bore no responsibility. Celadon's defense was built on shifting blame to Chickasaw. That strategy collapsed on the second-to-last day of the six-day trial in May 2013: Celadon withdrew its comparative-fault allegation against Chickasaw, Chickasaw won a directed verdict, and Celadon was left as the only defendant.
The plaintiff's case put concrete numbers to the harm. Borne could no longer perform the heavy work of loading and unloading chemicals into a tanker, so his lost earning capacity was central, alongside his pain, his permanent injury, and the activities the crash took from him. The jury returned an itemized verdict of $3,705,000: $1,455,000 for loss of earning capacity, $750,000 for physical pain and mental suffering, $750,000 for permanent injury, and $750,000 for loss of enjoyment of life.
Celadon moved for a new trial or, alternatively, for a remittitur. The trial court found the award excessive and cut it by $1,605,000, to $2.1 million. Borne accepted that reduction under protest, and the dispute over how far a court may cut a jury's number went up on appeal.
In 2017 the Tennessee Supreme Court used the case to fix the rule. An appellate court may order its own remittitur only when an award exceeds the uppermost boundary of the range of reasonableness, and when it reviews a trial court's reduction it must decide whether that reduction is supported by a preponderance of the evidence. Because the trial judge had offered little explanation for the cut, the court sent the case back so the reasons could be stated. On the later remand, the loss-of-earning-capacity award was set at $1,334,647, leaving Borne's recovery below the jury's original $3.7 million figure.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts: Supreme Court Clarifies Standard for Reduction of Jury Verdict (2017)
- 2.Tennessee Court of Appeals: Borne v. Celadon Trucking Services, Inc. opinion (full text, primary source)·Archived copy
- 3.vLex case database: Borne v. Celadon Trucking Servs., Inc., 532 S.W.3d 274 (Tenn. 2017)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Greer Injury Lawyers
All Greer Injury Lawyers proven verdicts →A Shelby County jury found two Regional One obstetric physicians negligently delayed a C-section through a prolonged labor, leaving a first-time mother's newborn with a brain injury and lifelong disability, and returned a $38,816,500 verdict.
A Marion County jury awarded $9.4 million after a Cracker Barrel waitress refilled a customer's glass with a mix of water and commercial bleach instead of ice water.
After State Farm denied uninsured-motorist coverage and defended the driver who caused the crash, a Memphis jury held him 85 percent at fault for the collision that killed Kathryn Sadowski and injured her 90-year-old husband, Emil.
A Shelby County jury awarded Julius Malone and his wife $2,519,772 after an ASF Intermodal semi-truck merged into his lane on I-240 in Memphis, and Tennessee's noneconomic-damages cap later reduced the judgment to $1,529,772.
Related truck accident verdicts
A Nassau County jury found two trucking companies responsible for the 2017 chain-reaction crash on I-95 near Yulee that killed 18-year-old Connor Dzion, returning a $1 billion verdict that Curry Pajcic won for the teen's parents.
A Titus County jury awarded $730 million to the family of Toni Combest, a 73-year-old great-grandmother killed when a Landstar Ranger truck hauling a 197,000-pound Navy submarine propeller struck her car on a narrow Highway 271 bridge, though the family's actual recovery came from pretrial settlements: $50 million from Landstar Ranger and $1 million from escort company S&M Pilot Service, with the verdict itself returned against the small front-escort company 2A Pilot Cars.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
On February 13, 2016, 21-year-old Riley McPherson was killed on U.S. 271 near Gilmer, Texas, when his van struck the side of a Jefferson Trucking flatbed tractor-trailer that was blocking all four lanes of the highway while its driver, on hour 17 of a run home from Ohio, tried to back it into a private driveway. McPherson's parents, Eddie McPherson and Karen Pearson, sued Jefferson Trucking, driver Eric Wayne Jefferson, and Timothy Wayne Jefferson in the 115th District Court of Upshur County. On November 8, 2018, a jury apportioned 65 percent fault to Eric Jefferson, 20 percent to Jefferson Trucking, 10 percent to Timothy Jefferson, and 5 percent to McPherson, and set damages at $260 million, which the comparative-fault finding reduced to $247 million. The defendants appealed, then voluntarily dismissed their own appeal, leaving the trial court judgment intact.