Editing Ford Pinto (section)

==== ''Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.'' ====
''[[Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.]]'', decided in February 1978, is one of two important Pinto cases.<ref name="Danley">{{harvnb|Danley|2005}}</ref> A 1972 Pinto driven by Lily Gray stalled in the center lane of a California freeway. The car was struck from behind by a vehicle initially traveling at 50&nbsp;mph and impacted at an estimated between 30 and 50&nbsp;mph, resulting in a fuel tank fire.<ref>{{harvnb|Schwartz|1991}}: The Pinto was then struck by a car, which had originally been traveling at about fifty miles per hour but which had braked down to a speed of perhaps thirty miles per hour at the point of impact.9 ... [footnote 9] For reasons quite beyond the court's control, its opinion must be treated cautiously as a source of actual facts. Because the defendant was appealing a jury verdict in favor of the plaintiffs, the court was under an obligation to view all the evidence in a way most favorable to the plaintiffs and essentially to ignore evidence in the record that might be favorable to the defendant. See id. at 773, 820, 174 Cal. Rptr. at 359, 388. In fact, Ford's basic position at trial-which the court's opinion at no point mentions was that the approaching car (a Ford Galaxie) had not slowed down at all, and had struck the Gray car at a speed in excess of 50 miles per hour. There was an enormous amount of evidence at trial supporting each of the parties' factual claims as to the Galaxie's closing speed. Had the jury accepted Ford's speed estimate, there would not have been much of an issue of crashworthiness: for the plaintiffs' position throughout the trial was that even a state-of-the-art fuel system could not maintain integrity in a 50 mile-per-hour collision.</ref> Gray died at the time of the impact. Richard Grimshaw, the thirteen-year-old passenger, was seriously burned.<ref>{{harvnb|Danley|2005}}: pg 208</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Schwartz|1991}}:pg 1016</ref> The plaintiff's bar collaborated with ''Mother Jones'' and The Center for Auto Safety to publicize damning information about Ford prior to trial.<ref name="Frank"/><ref>{{harvnb|Lee|Ermann|1999}}: Based on information given to it by lawyers preparing cases against Ford, the Center for Auto Safety petitioned NHTSA in the mid-1970s to investigate the Pinto's rear-end design. According to material presented on the Center's website, Dowie's article is based on that information, made available to him by the Center (www.autosafety.org). "Pinto Madness" is still available on the Mother Jones website along with a video clip showing a Pinto catching fire after being rear-ended. In an interview with Schwartz, Copp asserted that he was also a major source of the information for the Mother Jones story, Schwartz, "The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case," 1027, n.53</ref> The jury awarded $127.8&nbsp;million in total [[damages]]; $125&nbsp;million in [[punitive damages]] and $2,841,000 in compensatory damages to passenger Richard Grimshaw and $665,000 in compensatory damages to the family of the deceased driver, Lily Gray. The jury award was said to be the largest ever in US product liability and personal injury cases.<ref>{{harvnb|Schwartz|1991}}: after deliberating for eight hours - awarded the Gray family wrongful death damages of $560,000; Grimshaw was awarded over $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $125 million in punitive damages as well. The trial judge reduced the punitive damage award to $3.5 million as a condition for denying a new trial. Two years later the court of appeal affirmed these results in all respects; the state supreme court then denied a hearing.</ref> The jury award was the largest against an automaker at the time.<ref>{{cite news |first1=Nichole M |last1=Christian |first2=Angelo B |last2=Henderson |first3=Asra Q |last3=Nomani |title=Chrysler is Told to Pay $262.5 Million by Jurors in Minivan-Accident Trial |newspaper=The Wall Street Journal |date=October 9, 1997 |page=1 |url= https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB876346627583219500 |access-date=March 4, 2016 |archive-date=November 16, 2019 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20191116233751/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB876346627583219500 |url-status=live }}</ref> The judge reduced the jury's punitive damages award to $3.5&nbsp;million, which he later said was "still larger than any other punitive damage award in the state by a factor of about five."<ref name=latimes20080419>{{cite news |title=Retired O.C. judge handled major cases |date=April 19, 2008 |first=Dennis |last=McLellan |newspaper=Los Angeles Times |access-date=March 4, 2016 |url= https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-apr-19-me-goldstein19-story.html |archive-date=October 12, 2018 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20181012204857/http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/19/local/me-goldstein19 |url-status=live }}</ref> Ford subsequently decided to settle related cases out of court.<ref>{{harvnb|Danley|2005}}: pg 209</ref>

Reaction to the Grimshaw case was mixed. According to the ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'' in 2010, the award "signaled to the auto industry that it would be harshly sanctioned for ignoring known defects."<ref name="Williams">{{cite news |title=Toyota is just the latest automaker to face auto safety litigation |date=March 14, 2010 |first=Carol J. |last=Williams |newspaper=Los Angeles Times |access-date=March 4, 2016 |url= https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-mar-14-la-fi-toyota-litigate14-2010mar14-story.html |archive-date=January 15, 2018 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20180115021647/http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/14/business/la-fi-toyota-litigate14-2010mar14 |url-status=live }}</ref> The case has been held up as an example of the disconnection between the use of corporate risk analysis and the tendency of juries to be offended by such analyses.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Viscusi |first1=W. Kip |title=Corporate Risk Analysis: A Reckless Act? |journal=Stanford Law Review|volume=52|issue=3|date=February 2000 |page=569 |doi=10.2307/1229473 |url= https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/212_Corporate-Risk-Analysis.pdf |quote=The basic problem is that jurors do not undertake a comprehensive risk analysis approach, regardless of its character. Jurors have a tendency to compare the often very small per-unit safety cost with the costs borne by the injured victim. Rather than examine the entire market and the associated benefits and costs, jurors will be offended by, or will not fully understand, a comprehensive risk-analysis approach and will focus their assessment more narrowly on the identified victim and the costs of preventing that injury. The fact that these costs would also have been incurred for thousands of consumers who were not injured will not loom as large, as Judge Easterbrook emphasized. Thus, there is a tendency to exhibit "[[hindsight bias]]" rather than to consider the expected costs and expected benefits at the time of the safety decision.|jstor=1229473|hdl=1803/6556|hdl-access=free|access-date=2016-04-14|archive-date=2021-01-24|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20210124211316/https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/212_Corporate-Risk-Analysis.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> The case is also cited as an example of irrational punitive damage awards.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Viscusi |first1=W. Kip |title=Corporate Risk Analysis: A Reckless Act?|journal=Stanford Law Review|volume=52|issue=3 |date=February 2000 |page=569 |doi=10.2307/1229473 |url= https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/212_Corporate-Risk-Analysis.pdf |jstor=1229473 |hdl=1803/6556|hdl-access=free|access-date=2016-04-14 |archive-date=2021-01-24 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20210124211316/https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/212_Corporate-Risk-Analysis.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> While supporting the finding of liability, Schwartz notes that the punitive damage award is hard to justify.<ref>{{ cite journal|last1=Schwartz|first1=Gary T.|title=Deterrence and Punishment in the Common Law of Punitive Damages: A Comment |journal=Southern California Law Review |date=1982–1983 |page=134 |quote=The Court of Appeal's opinion thus suggested that the Court would have been equally willing to have affirmed the trial judge's decision had he either accepted the jury's $125 million award or reduced the award to $1 million. From a deterrence standpoint, it confounds understanding to permit such vast uncertainty as to the level of the expected penalty.}}</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Schwartz|1991}}: Hence, there was nothing clearly wrong in subjecting Ford to liability for harms resulting from that latter category of fires. The punitive damage award in the Ford Pinto case is, however, much more difficult to justify. To a large extent, it rested on the premise that Ford had behaved reprehensibly when it balanced safety against cost in designing the Pinto. However, the process by which manufacturers render such trade-off design decisions seems not only to be anticipated but endorsed by the prevailing risk-benefit standard for design liability. Accordingly, the Pinto jury's decision that punitive damages were appropriate - a decision that was affirmed by the trial judge and the court of appeal - raises serious questions about the operational viability of the risk-benefit standard itself.</ref>