March 4, 2004
Verdict is $47 Million - Paralyzed girl wins case against Ford
By Beth Warren, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A Fulton County jury delivered a $47 million blow to Ford Motor Co. this week for a crash that left a Cobb County girl paralyzed from the chest down.

On Wednesday, jurors ordered the world's No. 3 automaker to pay just under $14 million as punishment for a "conscious indifference to the consequences" of not addressing safety concerns with its 2000 Lincoln LS luxury sedan.

A day earlier, the jury awarded the girl, Kelsey Sasser, 9 and her family more than $33 million as compensation for her pain, expenses and permanently altered life.

"I'm glad this is over," the child's mother, Rhonda Sasser, said outside the courtroom. "I'm ready to start moving forward and giving Kelsey a better life. She definitely will get better care."

Sasser, a registered nurse, said her family has mounting medical bills and insurance wouldn't cover all of the therapy her child needs.

Kelsey, a cheerful girl with big blue eyes and freckles, came to court in her wheelchair last week to testify, bringing some jurors to tears. But her mother said she shields Kelsey from details about the case. Kelsey was back in classes at Sope Creek Elementary School in east Cobb this week and wasn't in court to hear either verdict.

This is the first known lawsuit involving this Ford model and this problem. A defective latch allowed some rear fold-down seats to collapse during collisions. The seats were designed to fold from the upright position to make room for skis and other equipment.

The family blamed Ford and the Atlanta dealership that sold them the sedan for not warning them about the potential defect. The seat collapsed on Kelsey, then age 6, in a summer 2000 crash outside Blakely in southwest Georgia.

Attorneys for Ford had asked for a mistrial Wednesday morning. They claimed someone with their law firm heard two jurors inappropriately discussing the case in the hallway before closing arguments. They claimed a female juror said: "Let's hit them for another $130 million." And a male juror responded: "No, that's too much."

Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter questioned the woman, who denied making the statement. Ford's attorneys then asked to bring in the male juror, but Baxter refused and ordered the trial to resume.

During closing arguments Wednesday, the Sassers' attorney, Jeff Harris of Savannah, suggested that making the multibillion-dollar corporation pay $101 million would send a message. He told jurors that Ford knew of design problems with the latch as early as 1993. Ford changed its design on 2001 models but didn't recall the 2000 sedan.

Don Dawson, a Detroit attorney representing Ford, asked jurors to think of the 300,000 employees - from the chief executive officer down to the janitors - who could be affected by another large verdict in the case.

Last year, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in an unrelated case against Ford called for an end to exorbitant punitive damages in product liability cases. The court wrote that those verdicts should be keyed to victims' economic loss, not the defendant's deep pockets.

Ford is expected to appeal both verdicts.