By Sylvia Hsieh
The Daily Record Newswire
Two small-firm lawyers have won a jury verdict of $29 million against the state of California’s transportation department for a head-on highway crash that killed two children, and left another child paralyzed and the driver brain-damaged.
The lawyers convinced the jury that Caltrans failed to address a hazardous stretch of road even though the driver who crashed into the plaintiffs’ vehicle was convicted of second-degree murder for the accident.
“The biggest challenge was overcoming [the other driver’s] gross negligence. We were very concerned the jury would decide he was 100 percent at fault,” said Richard Bennett of the three-lawyer firm Bennett & Johnson in Oakland, Calif., who represented the plaintiffs.Bennett and co-counsel Thomas Brandi of the Brandi Law Firm in San Francisco told the jury that if the state engineers had simply done their job, the accident would not have occurred.
“This was a clearly preventable accident, but the state’s conduct made it inevitable,” said Brandi.
The jury found the state 35 percent responsible for the accident, and the other driver, Nicola Bucci, 65 percent responsible. However, Caltrans will wind up paying over $20 million of the $29.2 million verdict because of state joint and several liability rules that make the state entirely liable for medical bills, Bennett said.
Nov. 17, 2006 should have been a day of celebration for Kenya Hutchinson. She had just been promoted at her job at the state prison in Vacaville, Calif. and was buying a new car with her father.
The purchase was taking longer than expected, so Hutchinson phoned her friend from church, Regina Jackson, and asked if she could pick up her three sons from school.
Jackson took the children to McDonald’s and then to visit her father. She was heading home on Highway 12 when Bucci crossed over the median line and hit her car head-on.
The accident killed 12-year-old Demari and 7-year-old Immanuel. Their 10-year-old brother Jordan suffered brain damage and is paralyzed from the waist down, requiring around-the-clock care.
Jackson also suffered brain damage in the collision.
Bucci, the driver of the other car, was convicted of second-degree murder. In 1994, he had also crossed over a median line and killed an elderly couple.
Because Bucci claimed that he had fallen asleep after working with dry ice at an event, the plaintiffs settled with the companies that provided the ice, Google, Bon Appetit and San Jose Ice Co., for $500,000, according to Bennett.
At trial against Caltrans, the plaintiffs’ attorneys portrayed a state transportation department with its head in the sand.
They argued that the state should have put up a median barrier or improved sight lines to remedy a dangerous two-lane road — something the state did on another two-lane road, Highway 37, that virtually eliminated fatalities caused by drivers crossing over the median line.
“In 1994, 1996, 1998, 2004 and 2006, the state had internal reports saying that a primary problem on this road was head-on accidents and improper passing,” said Brandi.
Countering defense testimony from Caltrans engineers that they were not aware of a history of accidents on Highway 12, the plaintiffs’ attorneys introduced evidence of over 100 accidents and 47 deaths, four of which happened after their clients’ accident.
They also showed that Caltrans overlooked approved plans from 1996-98 to rehabilitate the road by adding shoulder lanes and leveling out the roller-coaster effect of the roadway to improve sight lines.
“They were supposed to start in 2001-02. But it was never done until 2008,” said Brandi.
Using two video simulations of the accident, Bennett and Brandi argued first that if Caltrans had performed the rehabilitation, the vehicles would have seen each other in time or had shoulders to drive onto to avoid each other. They also argued that if Caltrans had put up a temporary center rail while waiting to start the project, Bucci would not have been able to cross over the center line.
Caltrans’ attorney Karl H. Schmidt did not respond to a voice mail left at his office seeking comment.
In closing arguments, Brandi took on the defense’s main argument that if Bucci had simply followed the law, the accident couldn’t have occurred.
Bennett told the jury there were “a hundred Bucci’s before this accident.”
“[I]f everyone followed the law, we would have no stop signs, no median barriers, no rails on bridges and no one would ever make a mistake. That’s not reality. In reality, sometimes people have brake problems, something goes wrong on the car. The state knows that and that’s why they have guard rails and sight distance requirements,” Brandi
told the jury.
With five of the 12 jurors aged between 18 and 22, led by a 19-year-old forewoman, it was the youngest jury Bennett or Brandi had faced.
“A lot of our jurors were students on summer break from college. It was a concern for us. I didn’t know how they would react to the state being a defendant or how they would react to the numbers,” said Bennett.
How would young jurors who did not have children respond to testimony from the boys’ mother and grandmother about the dreams they had that can no longer be fulfilled? Or testimony from Immanuel’s second grade teacher, who read a short story the 7 year old wrote about watching a scary movie and making popcorn with his mom?
But after a day and a half of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict consisting of $17.8 million for Jordan’s medical expenses and pain and suffering, $4 million for each son Hutchinson lost and $3.3 million for Jackson’s injuries.
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