McMath Woods

A Pulaski County circuit judge entered a $17.6 million default judgment against a former Little Rock 911 dispatcher who failed to relay a drowning-in-progress call to police and fire water rescue, resulting in the deaths of a mother and her young son over the following two years.

A federal jury held maintenance contractor Shaw Group liable under Arkansas law after U.S. Army Private Van Ryan Marcum was fatally electrocuted by an abandoned, improperly wired latrine at Fort Benning, returning a $6.5 million verdict affirmed by the Eighth Circuit.

A federal jury in Little Rock awarded Therese Westphal $2.5 million after finding that Antonella Carpenter and her company Lase Med Inc. defrauded her with sham laser treatments falsely marketed as a 100-percent cure for breast cancer.

An oiler paralyzed below the neck after a fuel-supply pontoon vessel capsized in dangerous lock-gate currents on the Arkansas River near Pine Bluff received a $1 million jury award in 1969, reported at the time as the first such verdict in Arkansas federal courts.

Diesel fuel leaked from a Felton Oil underground storage tank in Hampton, Arkansas, migrated onto the adjacent Gee property, and a jury awarded $205,000 for restoration costs and disruption, affirmed in full by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

A six-week federal jury trial found Tyson Foods liable for 43 separate Clean Water Act violations tied to industrial wastewater from its Green Forest, Arkansas poultry plant, with compensatory damages awarded to 40 Carroll County families.