Top Individual Personal Injury Verdicts and Settlements of 2004

In June 2004 a San Diego jury ordered Ford Motor Co. to pay $368.6 million to Benetta Buell-Wilson, a San Diego mother of two left paralyzed when her 1997 Explorer rolled four and a half times and the roof crushed onto her neck. It was Ford's first trial loss in an Explorer rollover case after a long string of defense verdicts. The trial court cut the award to $150 million, the Court of Appeal reduced it to $82.6 million in 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court sent it back after Philip Morris v. Williams, the Court of Appeal reinstated the $82.6 million in 2008, and Ford paid the judgment, with interest that pushed the punitive portion to about $87 million, after the Supreme Court declined review in late 2009. Dennis Schoville of Schoville & Arnell was lead trial counsel. The firm is no longer in active practice, and this page documents the case as part of the public record.

A Los Angeles jury awarded $58,137,361 to a construction worker who suffered third-degree burns over 75 percent of his body when a defective O-ring on a Caterpillar scraper caused flammable hydraulic fluid to spray onto a hot engine, producing what was then the largest single-plaintiff personal-injury verdict in California history.

A Cook County jury awarded the Yoder family $38.3 million after a multi-truck pileup on Interstate 90 near Rockford killed their four-year-old daughter and left their two-year-old son permanently disabled, and the verdict survived appeal in 2008.

Robert Mongeluzzi served as co-lead counsel in the $29.5 million global settlement resolving claims for three women who drowned and 40 patrons injured when the 91-year-old Pier 34 buckled beneath Club Heat nightclub and dropped into the Delaware River on May 18, 2000.

A Milwaukee jury verdict and a related settlement delivered $25.24 million to a family after an unlicensed first-year resident spent 11 hours treating their teenage daughter for constipation while a twisted bowel killed the tissue it fed.

On February 13, 2004, a Bronx jury awarded $86,735,134 to Frank Miraglia, a 45 year old construction laborer who fell into a trench when an unsecured plank collapsed under him and was impaled on a steel rebar that severed his spinal cord, leaving him a paraplegic. Steven L. Hess, then of Simonson, Hess & Leibowitz, P.C., was trial counsel; the firm continues today as Hess & Leibowitz, PLLC. The trial judge reduced the award to $25,030,134, and in January 2007 the Appellate Division, First Department trimmed it further, sustaining $5 million for past pain and suffering, conditioning the future pain and suffering award on a reduction from $10 million to $5 million (a reduction Miraglia accepted by stipulation), and cutting future medical expenses to $8,056,222, which left the judgment at just under $20 million.

Pepper DeVaughn served as co-counsel for Roger Ediger, an Enid attorney and former farmer who blew the whistle on Gold Banc Corporation for inflating interest rates on federally guaranteed agricultural loans, producing a $16 million settlement that stood as the largest False Claims Act recovery in the Western District of Oklahoma at the time.

A Jackson County jury held Ford Motor Company liable for a defective fuel tank design after three members of a Missouri family burned to death when their F-150 pickup ruptured and ignited during a 1999 highway collision.

A Cook County jury awarded Jean Frigo $7,775,668.02 after finding that Silver Cross Hospital and Medical Center negligently credentialed a podiatrist who cut through her infected diabetic ulcer during bunion surgery, an error that led to a bone infection and the amputation of her foot. The podiatrist, Paul Kirchner, had never met the hospital's own criteria for surgical privileges and settled with Frigo separately for $900,000 before trial. The trial court credited that settlement against the verdict, entering judgment against Silver Cross for $6,875,668.02. The Appellate Court of Illinois affirmed in full in 2007, in a decision credited with establishing negligent credentialing as an independent cause of action under Illinois law.

A 40-year-old store manager was left permanently impaired after a radiologist dismissed signs of a carotid blockage on her MRI, and a D.C. jury awarded $5,774,156 for the malpractice that preceded her stroke.

Jose Raimundo Madeira, a roofer employed by C & L Construction, fell from the top of a building at a development site in Monroe, New York, on June 20, 2001. A federal jury in the Southern District of New York found the site owner and the general contractor liable under Labor Law 240(1) and awarded $638,671.63 in compensatory damages. The Second Circuit affirmed the judgment in all respects in November 2006.

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.

Thomas Simeone led a class action on behalf of deaf and hard-of-hearing Washington, D.C., moviegoers, obtaining a 2004 federal court settlement that required AMC Entertainment and Loews Cineplex to install rear-window captioning systems, giving the D.C. deaf community broader access to captioned first-run films than any comparable market in the country.

Frederick R. Hovde secured a 2004 Indiana Supreme Court ruling holding that companies licensing their trademarks for use on consumer products may be held liable in negligence when those products cause injury.

Richard Alexander represented roughly 250 current and former IBM San Jose disk-drive plant workers and their families who alleged cancers and birth defects from chemical exposures, ultimately reaching a confidential settlement with IBM in June 2004 after a bellwether jury trial found for IBM.

The estate and daughter of Patricia Martin, a 36-year-old Domino Sugar employee who died after superheated slurry burned nearly half her body during a routine maintenance task, settled confidentially against the equipment contractor Maryland Mechanical Systems Inc. at the close of the plaintiff's case in July 2004.