The $242.1 Million Toyota Seatback Verdict for Two Young Children Brain-Injured in the Back Seat of a Lexus, Reduced to $213 Million by Texas Damage Caps and Settled Confidentially While Before the Texas Supreme Court

On September 25, 2016, Benjamin Reavis was driving his family's 2002 Lexus ES 300 on North Central Expressway in Dallas with his wife Kristi beside him and their two children, a 5-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son, strapped into child safety seats in the back. Traffic slowed, and a Honda Pilot driven by Michael Mummaw slammed into them from behind at roughly 45 miles per hour, pushing the Lexus into the car ahead. The crash itself was survivable. What turned it catastrophic, the family alleged, was what happened inside the car: both front seatbacks collapsed rearward under the impact, launching the parents' bodies and heads into the children behind them. Both children were rushed to the hospital with severe head trauma, and both were left with permanent brain injuries.

Benjamin and Kristi Reavis sued Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Motor Sales in Dallas County's 134th Judicial District Court, before Judge Dale Tillery. Frank L. Branson led the trial team, joined by Debbie Branson, Chip Brooker, and Eric Stahl. The case they put on over roughly three weeks was a design case: the front seats of the ES 300 were unreasonably dangerous in a rear-end collision, Toyota knew seatback collapse could kill or maim the people sitting behind them, and the company warned no one. Branson argued that Toyota made a deliberate engineering tradeoff, protecting front-seat occupants from whiplash at the expense of whoever happened to be seated in back.

On August 17, 2018, after about eight hours of deliberation across two days, the jury returned its verdict: $242.1 million, including roughly $98 million in compensatory damages and $144 million in punitive damages after a finding of gross negligence, with $129.6 million of the punitive award assessed against Toyota Motor Corporation and $14.4 million against Toyota Motor Sales. Jurors put 95 percent of the responsibility on Toyota and only 5 percent on Mummaw, the driver who actually hit them. Trial press treated the verdict as a landmark in the long-running national fight over seatback strength, a defect auto-safety advocates had been flagging for decades.

What happened after the verdict has to be told just as plainly. Texas law caps punitive damages, and Judge Tillery applied the cap, entering judgment for about $213 million. Toyota appealed. In June 2021 a divided panel of the Dallas Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment over a dissent, and Toyota took the case up to the Texas Supreme Court. In December 2021, with briefing at the state's highest court just underway, the parties settled. The terms are confidential, so the public record ends with a $213 million judgment and a resolution amount nobody outside the case knows.

What the case left behind is still substantial: a jury's formal finding, affirmed on first appeal, that the seats in one of the best-selling sedans in America were unreasonably dangerous to the children riding behind them, and a verdict large enough that it was reported nationwide as one of the biggest product-defect awards of its year.