Wabash got some good news March 20 when a court reduced a $450 million punitive damage award to $108 million for a 2019 accident. The less-than-good news is the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri denied the Wabash request for a new trial. Wabash on March 28 filed a notice of appeal with Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District.
A St. Louis jury returned a $462 million verdict last September, with $450 million of that designated as punitive damages, in a lawsuit claiming Wabash National should have built a better rear impact guard 20 years ago.
“Wabash continues to believe both that the damages remain abnormally high and the verdict is not supported by the facts or the law,” the company said in a statement. “Wabash stands firmly behind the quality and safety of all its products, and this ruling will not prevent the company from continuing to provide its customers with products that contribute to safer roads.”
See also: Jury returns half-billion-dollar verdict in underride case
Two young men (a father and a father-to-be) died in a 2019 accident when their Volkswagen sedan slammed at highway speed into the back of a tractor-trailer slowed to a near-stop in a construction zone. A toxicology report indicated that the driver was intoxicated at the time of the incident, and a separate police report indicated that neither passenger was wearing their seat belt.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, surviving family members, argued that a stronger RIG could have saved the lives of the driver and passenger, and that Wabash used a design that met the minimum federal requirements in place in 2004 rather than adopting a more robust RIG.
Wabash contended that the collision severity was “far in excess” of that contemplated by the RIG regulations, and that the plaintiff’s case—which focused on a RIG design from a decade later—punished Wabash for “current conduct” rather than the conduct related to the accident, a violation Missouri legal statutes and even a violation of Wabash’s Constitutional rights, as the company argued in a motion for a partial summary judgment.
For the lawyerly-minded, the docket can be found here.
See the April print edition of TBB for additional coverage.
