The Tennessee Supreme Court has upheld a trial court’s decision to award a couple $13 million in punitive damages in a wrongful death lawsuit involving a defective seat back against DaimlerChrysler Corp. According to an Associated Press news report, 8-month-old Joshua Flax was riding in the back seat of a 1998 Dodge Caravan in 2001 when the vehicle was rear-ended. This caused the front passenger seat to collapse and the passenger to strike the baby, fracturing his skull and resulting in fatal injuries.

The court decided in a 3-2 ruling that the automaker acted recklessly and the punitive damages were not excessive. The family had alleged in their lawsuit that DaimlerChrysler knew that the minivan’s seats were defective, but failed to fix the problem or warn consumers about it. Paul Sheridan, a former employee for Chrysler, had testified for the family saying that he had looked into minivan seat problems in the 1990s after getting reports or injuries to children during rear-end collisions.

Children are most often the victims of rear-end collisions that result in seatback failures.
According to the most recently available numbers, there were estimates of 1,100 deaths and 1,600 serious injuries in 1990 because of seat back failures in rear-end collisions.
These deaths could have been easily prevented had auto makers such as Ford and DaimlerChrysler changed their defective seat back design by applying proven safety measures and technology that have been readily available for decades.

In a rear-end accident, the mechanism holding up the back of the bucket seat can break causing the seat to collapse back and the occupant to fall back violently. The impact of a front seat passenger’s fall on anyone, especially a child sitting in the back seat, could be powerful enough to seriously injure or kill the child. Strangely enough, it’s the child, whose parent conscientiously buckles them in to the rear seat, who is most likely to suffer horrific injuries as a result of these seat back failures, which is what happened in this Nashville crash.

One of our clients, Stephanie Collins went through exactly the same situation. Her 7-year-old daughter, Crystal, died a day after a low-speed rear-end collision that caused the Ford Escort seat back to fail. The front seat seatback with Stephanie sitting in it, slammed back and Stephanie’s head hit Crystal’s chest due to the forces of the rear impact. But it’s not as if these auto makers don’t have the technology to make stronger seats. Just look at Ford’s Lincoln line of cars. These seats have the strength needed to protect back seat passengers in the event of a rear-end collision. For more information, please visit our comprehensive seat back failure Web site.