Ford Motor Co. plans to appeal a $1.7 billion verdict against the automaker after a pickup truck accident claimed the lives of a Georgia couple, a company representative said Sunday.
Jurors in Gwinnett County, just northeast of Atlanta, returned the verdict late last week in the year-long civil case involving what plaintiffs’ attorneys called dangerously defective roofs on Ford trucks, attorney James Butler Jr. said Sunday.
Melvin and Voncile Hill died in the April 2014 rollover accident of their 2002 Ford F-250. Their children, Kim and Adam Hill, were the plaintiffs in the wrongful death case.
“While our condolences are with the Hill family, we do not believe the evidence supports the verdict, and we plan to appeal,” Ford said in a statement to The Associated Press on Sunday.
Butler said he was stunned by the evidence in the case.
“I used to buy Ford trucks,” Butler said Sunday. “I thought no one would sell a truck with such a weak roof. The damn thing is useless in a wreck. Might as well drive a convertible.
In closing arguments, attorneys hired by the company defended the actions of Ford and its engineers.
The Michigan-based automaker sought to defend the company against accusations that “Ford and its engineers acted willfully and wantonly, with a conscious disregard for the safety of the people travelling in their cars when they made these decisions about the roof strength,” the defence attorney said. According to a court transcript, William Withrow Jr. said in his closing arguments.
The charge that Ford was irresponsible and deliberately made decisions that put customers at risk “is simply not the case,” another defence attorney, Paul Malek, said in the same closing argument.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys had presented evidence of nearly 80 similar rollover accidents involving crushed truck roofs and injured or killed motorists, Butler’s law firm, Butler Prather LLP, said in a statement.
“More deaths and serious injuries are certain because millions of these trucks are on the road,” Butler’s deputy attorney, Gerald Davidson, said in the statement.
“An award of punitive damages to hopefully warn the people who were riding in the millions of those trucks that Ford sold was why the Hill family insisted on a verdict,” Butler said.