Habush's $99.25 Million Miller Park Crane Collapse Verdict

On July 14, 1999, ironworkers were finishing the retractable roof at Miller Park, the new ballpark for the Milwaukee Brewers. A massive crawler crane nicknamed Big Blue, a Lampson Transi-Lift built for heavy lifts, was raising a roof section that weighed more than 400 tons. The wind was gusting hard that afternoon. As the lift went up, the crane buckled and its boom swung down onto a personnel basket suspended from a second crane, where three men were waiting to guide the panel into place.

All three were killed. Jeffrey Wischer, William DeGrave, and Jerome Starr were members of Iron Workers Local 8. Each left a wife and family. Other workers on the ground were hurt by falling debris, and the collapse pushed the stadium's opening back by a full year.

Robert Habush of Habush Habush & Rottier represented two of the widows in a wrongful death suit filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court. The central question at trial was why the lift went forward at all. The plaintiffs showed that the load and the wind that day put the crane outside the limits set by its own design specifications, and that the decision to keep lifting rested with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, the company overseeing the roof installation. Lampson International, which supplied the crane, was the other defendant.

In December 2000, the jury assigned 97 percent of the fault to Mitsubishi and 3 percent to Lampson. It awarded $5.25 million in compensatory damages for the widows and for the suffering of the three men, then added $94 million in punitive damages against Mitsubishi. The combined figure came to $99.25 million, one of the largest verdicts in Wisconsin history at the time.

The punitive award then went through two appeals. On September 30, 2003, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals threw out the $94 million award. Under the state's punitive damages statute, a plaintiff had to prove that a defendant either intended to cause injury or knew its conduct was practically certain to cause injury. The appeals court held that the record did not meet that bar and vacated the punitive damages while leaving the compensatory award in place. In March 2005 the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed (2005 WI 26), holding that a plaintiff need only show the defendant acted with intentional disregard of the rights of others, and sent the case back to decide whether $94 million was excessive.

Before that question was decided, the parties negotiated. In January 2006, the families settled for roughly $30 million, paid through a layered insurance program covering the construction site rather than by Mitsubishi directly. The figure closed out seven years of litigation over the deaths of the three ironworkers.