Kline & Specter's $153 Million Verdict Against Ford in a Fatal Parking-Brake Case
After trial: Ford appealed twice, and the Ninth Circuit reversed the punitive damages award in 2002 and again in 2007, ordering a new trial on the punitive amount each time; a 2004 retrial reset punitive damages at $52 million. The case settled confidentially in 2008, weeks before a third trial was scheduled to begin.
Won by Kline & Specter, PC.
A federal jury in Nevada found Ford's pickup parking brake defective and held that the company should have warned owners, returning a verdict near $153 million after three-year-old Walter White was killed by a truck that rolled in the family driveway. Shanin Specter of Kline & Specter tried the case.
What happened
In October 1994, three-year-old Walter White climbed into his family's 1993 Ford F-350 to reach his piggy bank. The pickup sat on a driveway with the parking brake set. The brake did not hold. The truck rolled, Walter fell beneath it, and he died. His parents, Ginny and Jimmie White of Elko, Nevada, sued Ford Motor Company.
The case turned on how the parking brake was built. Inside the mechanism, a part called the pawl was meant to lock against the teeth of a ratchet wheel. In a condition the engineers called "tip-on-tip," the pawl could slip over the tops of the teeth instead of catching, which let a parked truck drift on an incline. Ford had already identified a correction. It cost roughly fifteen cents.
Shanin Specter of Kline & Specter tried the case in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada, in Reno, before Judge David Warner Hagen. The plaintiffs proved a design defect and, just as central, a failure to warn. Evidence showed Ford knew the brake could disengage yet kept selling the trucks. Ford told dealers about the fix but instructed them to install it only if a customer complained. After discussions with federal safety regulators, Ford recalled the affected vehicles, but the recall mailing reached owners after Walter was already dead.
On July 31, 1998, the jury returned $2,305,435 in compensatory damages and $150,884,400 in punitive damages, a total near $153 million. Specter said it was the first major case over the parking-brake defect to reach trial in the country.
The award did not stand untouched. The trial court reduced the punitive figure to about $69 million. On appeal, in White v. Ford Motor Co., 312 F.3d 998 (9th Cir. 2002), a divided panel reversed the punitive judgment and ordered a new trial limited to the amount of punitive damages, holding that the jury had been allowed to punish Ford for conduct outside Nevada. A 2004 retrial set punitive damages at $52 million. In 2007, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that juries may not punish a defendant for harm to people who are not parties to the case, the Ninth Circuit again ordered the punitive amount retried. The findings that Ford was liable and that punishment was warranted were never disturbed.
Ford recalled roughly 884,000 trucks about a month after Walter White died.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Kline & Specter, PC
All Kline & Specter, PC proven verdicts →As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.
A Philadelphia jury found that Monsanto failed to warn that Roundup could cause cancer and awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion. The trial judge later reduced the award to $400 million.
After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia in May 2015, killing eight and injuring more than 200, Kline & Specter's Thomas R. Kline led the plaintiffs' negotiations that produced a $265 million settlement fund for the victims.
A Philadelphia jury found the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania liable for the brain injury a newborn suffered when staff delayed a cesarean section, a $182.7 million verdict that grew to a molded judgment of about $207.6 million, the largest medical malpractice award in Pennsylvania history. Kline & Specter argued and won the appeal, where the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment in July 2025.
Related product liability verdicts
Sullivan Papain was among the firms representing New York State against Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard, securing a $25 billion recovery through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.
C. Steven Yerrid, the youngest of Florida's 11-lawyer 'Dream Team,' added racketeering and conspiracy charges that tripled the damages ceiling, helping the state secure what was then the largest civil settlement in American history against the tobacco industry.
As co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation and the first firm to sue Monsanto in 2015, Weitz and Luxenberg helped negotiate a $10.9 billion settlement resolving approximately 125,000 non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims against Bayer-owned Monsanto.
After fifteen years of litigation and three failed bankruptcy maneuvers by Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, Ashcraft and Gerel attorneys R. Bryant McCulley and Michelle Parfitt helped negotiate a global, uncapped settlement of at least $5.5 billion covering approximately 76,000 ovarian-cancer claims.