$368.6 Million Ford Explorer Rollover Verdict

On January 19, 2002, Benetta Buell-Wilson was driving her 1997 Ford Explorer on Interstate 8 near Alpine, east of San Diego, when a metal object appeared in her path. She swerved to avoid it, lost control, and the Explorer rolled four and a half times. The roof collapsed onto her neck and severed her spine. A San Diego mother of two, she was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

She and her husband Barry Wilson sued Ford and the dealership Drew Ford in San Diego Superior Court, alleging that the Explorer's high center of gravity and narrow track made it prone to roll over in ordinary emergency maneuvers, and that its roof was too weak to protect occupants when it did. Ford had faced hundreds of Explorer rollover suits and had never lost one at trial. Dennis Schoville and Louis Arnell of San Diego's Schoville & Arnell took the case anyway, trying it with a single associate against Ford's defense team.

Trial began on March 15, 2004, and ran roughly two and a half months. The jury found the Explorer defectively unstable and its roof not crashworthy, and found that Ford had failed to warn the Wilsons of both dangers. In the first days of June 2004 it awarded Mrs. Wilson $109,606,004 in compensatory damages, including $105 million for her pain and suffering, plus $13 million to her husband for loss of consortium. On June 3, 2004, it added $246 million in punitive damages, bringing the total to $368.6 million. Buell-Wilson had publicly offered to take $100 million less if Ford would fix the vehicles still on the road; Ford maintained the Explorer was safe and appealed.

What happened next has to be stated just as plainly, because most of that number did not survive. The trial court found the award excessive and remitted it to $150 million: $70 million in compensatory damages, $5 million for loss of consortium, and $75 million in punitive damages. In July 2006 the Court of Appeal cut it again, reducing the noneconomic damages to $18 million and the punitive damages to $55 million, for a total judgment of $82,606,004. In May 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that decision and sent the case back for reconsideration in light of its ruling in Philip Morris v. Williams, which limited punishing a defendant for harm to people who are not before the court. On March 10, 2008, the Court of Appeal reinstated the same $82.6 million judgment, with Schoville & Arnell listed as counsel for the Wilsons in both appellate rounds.

Ford pressed on to the U.S. Supreme Court a second time, and on November 30, 2009, more than five years after the verdict, the Court declined to hear the case. That ended the litigation. By the time the appeals ran out in December 2009, the award stood at about $87 million with accumulated interest.

So the record holds two numbers at once: the $368.6 million verdict, at the time the largest ever against Ford and the award that broke the company's unbeaten run in Explorer rollover trials, and the $82.6 million judgment that stood after every appeal. Both are true, and the distance between them is five years of post-trial litigation that reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice. Schoville & Arnell is no longer an active practice, and this page preserves the case as a documented court record rather than a promotion of any firm.