By Alyson E. Raletz
and Tony Ogden
The Daily Record Newswire
BOSTON, MA -- Attorneys in Missouri have used a legal doctrine rarely seen in state court to obtain a $35.25 million jury verdict in a truck fatality case.
The doctrine -- offensive nonmutual collateral estoppel -- allowed lead plaintiffs' counsel Kenneth McClain and co-plaintiffs' counsel Danny Thomas of Humphrey, Farrington & McClain in Independence, Mo., to limit the trial to a determination of damages.
"We walked in winning," said Thomas.
The accident occurred on an interstate highway in Missouri in June 2006 when George Albright Jr. allegedly fell asleep at the wheel. The tractor trailer he was driving slammed into the rear of a car in which Anita Gibbs was a passenger. The four occupants of the car -- all on their way to a wedding -- were killed in the crash.
McClain and Thomas were able to piggyback on the $18 million mid-trial settlement they had previously secured for the deaths of the three other occupants of the car. The three-week long trial in 2008 involved wrongful death claims filed by the children of the car's driver, Beverly Garrett, on behalf of Garrett, their grandmother and an aunt.
The new $5.25 million compensatory award and $30 million punitive award came at the end of a trial involving claims brought by Gibbs' widower, Roy Gibbs Jr.
On the eve of the Gibbs trial in October, Judge Robert Koffman allowed the plaintiff's motion for estoppel, preventing the defendants from rearguing issues that had already been determined in the prior federal trial in 2008. (The latest trial in the case was held in state court as a result of a strategy decision by the Gibbs family's original attorneys, McClain said.)
Jurors were told from day one that the previous case's jury had found the group of trucking companies that employed Albright liable for both compensatory and punitive damages for the deaths of the other three occupants of the car. They also knew that a human resources company, Trucker's Plus, was liable because it should have known Albright was medically unfit to drive. Those plaintiffs won a verdict of $15 million in compensatory damages, but the parties reached an $18 million settlement before jurors took up punitives. Albright, the driver of the truck, was acquitted on four counts of second-degree manslaughter a few months later. He was eventually dismissed from the Gibbs case.
David Achtenberg, a professor of civil procedure at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, said that Missouri courts have allowed offensive nonmutual collateral estoppel in the past, but they are reluctant to do so if there are inequity issues.
He said the estoppel tactic isn't used often because groups of plaintiffs with claims involving a single incident generally try their cases together, and their attorneys want the jury to hear the details of any wrongdoing to prompt a larger verdict.
McClain maintained that estoppel in this case was "a mixed blessing because, although we won, it was hard to [bring] any emotion to the case."
"Estoppel means essentially that you can't relitigate something that's already been established as a fact," said Thomas. "The downside of that for us was convincing the jury to award damages even though they weren't going to know any of the facts [behind the court's findings]."
The first trial included evidence that doctors had prescribed Albright with 150 muscle relaxant pills, that he'd falsified logs on the day of the wreck and wasn't well-rested at the time of the crash.
David Domina, defense attorney for Albright's employer Centra Inc. and the other trucking companies, said the judge's decision to allow estoppel significantly limited the defense's options.
Domina had planned on trying to block the jury from considering punitive damages, but was prevented from using that strategy because the prior federal jury already had deemed the trucking companies liable for the damages.
He had also intended to present evidence showing jurors that the driver suffered from a sudden medical emergency, a hypoglycemic reaction, just before the crash, but the judge wouldn't allow it. He later agreed to add it to the court record, but took no action to throw the case out. According to McClain, the court filed the final judgment in the case on Nov. 11.
Published: Thu, Nov 25, 2010
