$12 Million Verdict for Man Who Lost Both Legs, Entered at $4.2 Million Under Tennessee's Damages Cap
After trial: The signed Judgment Entry on Jury Verdict, filed December 2, 2021, cut the $12 million jury verdict to $4,203,547 "pursuant to statute", then apportioned that reduced amount between the defendants by their assigned share of fault. The order does not itemize the calculation, though the size of the reduction is consistent with Tennessee's cap on noneconomic damages.
Won by Hughes & Coleman Injury Lawyers.
A Davidson County jury awarded Charles Ray Peterson Jr. $12 million after a two-vehicle chain-reaction crash on Christmas Day 2017 cost him both legs, but the signed judgment entered against the defendants totals $4,203,547 once Tennessee's statutory damages cap was applied to the verdict.
What happened
Charles Ray Peterson Jr. was driving from Memphis to Nashville on Christmas Day 2017 when another driver, Jonathan L. Smith, struck his vehicle and forced it into the median. Before Peterson could recover from that first impact, a commercial truck owned by Mid-TN Erosion and Sediment Control, Inc. and driven by Christopher Richey made a sudden highway turn. The trailer fishtailed and struck Peterson's car a second time. Peterson survived, but both of his legs had to be amputated.
He filed suit in Davidson County Circuit Court in August 2018, naming Smith, Richey, and Mid-TN Erosion as defendants. The insurer representing the truck side of the case denied liability outright at first and offered $50,000 to settle. As trial approached, the number moved, first to $200,000, then $400,000, then $600,000 during the trial itself. Peterson's attorneys, D. Joe Griffith and Zachary Smith of Hughes & Coleman, kept the case in front of the jury.
Trial ran November 15 through November 19, 2021, before Judge Joseph P. Binkley Jr. The jury found Peterson free of fault and returned a verdict of $12 million, splitting responsibility between the two collisions: 55 percent to Jonathan Smith for the first impact and 45 percent to Christopher Richey and Mid-TN Erosion for the second.
The number reported in verdict trackers and news coverage stops there. It is not the number that was actually entered against the defendants. The Judgment Entry on Jury Verdict, signed by Judge Binkley and filed December 2, 2021, states plainly that "pursuant to statute, the gross verdict is hereby reduced to $4,203,547.00." Tennessee law caps noneconomic damages, the pain-and-suffering component of a verdict, at $750,000 in most personal injury cases, but raises that ceiling to $1 million for a catastrophic injury, which the statute defines to include the amputation of two feet or one of each. Peterson's injury meets that definition. While the judgment entry does not itemize the calculation, the size of the reduction is consistent with a noneconomic award capped at $1 million layered on top of an economic damages award, for medical costs and future care, that was not capped at all.
Working from the reduced total, the court entered judgment against Jonathan Smith for $2,311,950.85 and against Christopher Richey and Mid-TN Erosion jointly for $1,891,596.15, tracking the jury's 55/45 fault split. Peterson was also awarded his court costs as the prevailing party.
No appeal of the judgment has been reported. The case is a useful illustration of a gap that shows up across verdict reporting generally: press coverage and legal-marketing pages tend to repeat the jury's gross number because that is the figure announced in the courtroom, while the amount a defendant is actually ordered to pay, after a state's damages statute is applied, is a separate figure that requires the judgment itself to confirm.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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.