Judge Makes Key Rulings in GM Ignition Defect MDL Case
ALM Media
Updated
The General Motors Headquarters, located in Detroit, Michigan.
Both sides scored points Friday as another bellwether ignition defect case against General Motorsheads toward trial next month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Judge Jesse Furman issued a 19-page order teeing up the case by dealing with pretrial requests. The judge dealt with four motions in limine from attorneys representing Dennis Ward, an Arizona man alleging that GM's highly-publicized ignition defect caused his crash and lasting injuries.
Furman said yes one to motion, no to two and maybe to the other.
Plus, the judge granted Ward's request for advance ruling on admitting evidence of 60 similar instances but said no to some of them in terms of proving causation and existence of a defect.
Among the cases Furman ruled out as evidence is the one that discovered the ignition defect that was causing engines to switch off at highway speeds, shutting down power for steering, brakes and air bags.
Ken and Beth Melton filed the lawsuit that launched more than 1,000 others plus 30 million recalls and $35 million in fines and fees against General Motors, now called new GM in the resulting multidistrict litigation in New York. Their lawyer, Lance Cooper of Marietta, hired an investigator who found the problem they said caused the crash that killed 29-year-old Brooke Melton.
Brooke Melton's parents settled their initial lawsuit in 2013 for $5 million a figure that was confidential but disclosed by GM in discovery. In 2014, the Meltons tried to give the money back and filed a lawsuit alleging fraud, after learning from a document produced for Congress that an engineer at GM knew about the defect and didn't disclose it to the public or them even in a deposition. The next year, they settled again for another undisclosed but higher figure, leaving the offspring plaintiffs to continue litigating.
Furman said excluding the Melton case from proving causation was an easy call because it was a different kind of car with a different switch. Melton had a 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt. Ward was driving a 2009 Chevrolet HHR.
The Ward case follows three others tried before Furman.
Plaintiffs counsel celebrated the 54 similar incidents the judge allowed into evidence.
GM's defective ignition switch cast its dark and deadly cloud across the entirety of our country, sparing very few, said Robert Hilliard of Hilliard Munoz Gonzales of Corpus Christi, Texas. GM spins its story and its deadly cover-up to attempt to understate just how many dozens and dozens of times it had notice of its defect, of the deaths and injuries it is responsible for and of the countless innocent families devastated by its corporate greed.
GM's lead counsel, Andrew Baker Bloomer of Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, could not be reached.
In one clear victory for Ward on Friday, Furman granted a motion to exclude his traffic ticket from the scene of the crash. Ward argued that Arizona law makes civil traffic citations inadmissible in litigation. GM countered that the federal rules are different and do allow such evidence.
The court concludes that Ward has the better of the argument, Furman wrote. Although there is general consensus that the Federal Rules of Evidence ordinarily govern in diversity cases, courts disagree about which cases apply.
The court concludes that the Arizona statute barring admission of a civil traffic complaint or a judgment on the complaint is substantive and thus applies, Furman said. He favored the Arizona law's primary objective namely, to encourage the quick resolution of traffic citations by allaying motorists' fears that if they pay a fine, that payment will be used against them in later proceedings.
Furman's ruling supports Arizona's approach, as well as other states with similar laws. The legislators approved these statutes to encourage defendants to plead guilty rather than to turn the traffic court into a battleground or discovery site for ensuing civil litigation, Furman said. It follows that the rule applies in this case and precludes New GM from using evidence of Ward's citation and admission of responsibility to prove his negligence.
Ward's lawyers did not fare so well in their efforts to keep the jury from knowing about his smoking habit. Plaintiffs counsel argued that Ward's history of smoking is irrelevant and prejudicial. But Furman called that line of reasoning patently meritless, substantially for the reasons provided by New GM in its opposition memorandum of law.
Furman went on to say that Ward's smoking is plainly relevant to his life expectancy and his claim for future damages, not to mention relevant to and probative of the cause of his alleged current and future symptoms. The judge even called into question Ward's expert's opinion that all of his disabilities are causally related to the accident.
Another takeaway from Furman's order is that Ward and his son were wasting their time making video recordings trying to flick the ignition switch into the off position. The videos got a bad review from the judge, who labeled it presentation through a lay witness of self-serving videos depicting unscientific demonstrations made for the purpose of litigation in order to prove precisely what the plaintiff needs to prove in that litigation.
The judge revealed a couple of other things he doesn't like: the way the plaintiffs lawyers are numbering motions in limine and the fact that the two sides are repeating each other in motions. Both sides will likely be taking measure of two revealing footnotes.
First, this came on Page 1:
For reasons that are not entirely clear, plaintiffs in this MDL have adopted the practice of numbering their motions in limine separately for each trial, restarting each time with the number one. By contrast, New GM continues in each trial from whatever number it finished at in the prior trial. Thus, New GM's Thirty-Third Motion in Limine is its thirty-third motion in limine in the MDL overall, not its thirty-third motion with respect to Ward.
Then this on Page 8, regarding duplication of motions:
Needless to say, the result of two motions addressing the same issue is six memoranda of law covering largely the same ground rather than the usual three. In future bellwether cases, the parties should meet and confer before filing motions in limine to minimize, if not eliminate, such duplicative briefing. The parties should confer and submit a proposed order to that effect if they believe that one is necessary.
Clearly, this judge has enough to read.
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