The Akron Legal News

Supreme Court of Ohio: Split court sides with Ford in faulty fuel tank case

ANNIE YAMSON
Special to the Legal News
Published: January 10, 2017

In one of several year-end decisions released by the Ohio Supreme Court as part of its transition process, a divided court ruled in favor of the Ford Motor Company in a faulty fuel tank case.

In an appeal to the high court, Ross Linert, a veteran police officer with the Austintown Township Police, contended that Ford was responsible for the severe injuries that he sustained in a motor-vehicle accident caused when an intoxicated driver, Adrien Foutz, struck Ross's 2005 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor from behind, triggering a fuel-fed fire.

According to Linert, the Mahoning County Court of Common Pleas should have instructed the jury, which found in favor of Ford, on Ohio's statute governing manufacturers' postmarket duty to warn consumers of risks associated with a product that are not discovered until after the product has been sold.

Linert alleged that Ford's gasoline tank was defectively designed and manufactured, and that Ford had an obligation to inform him of those defects.

On appeal from Linert, the 7th District Court of Appeals ruled that the jury should have been given the instruction.

But the Supreme Court's five-justice majority, in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, reversed that decision.

"To prove a 'failure to warn' claim, a plaintiff must establish that a duty to warn against reasonably foreseeable risks exists, a breach of that duty occurred, and the plaintiff's injuries were proximately caused by the breach," O'Connor wrote. "A manufacturer provides inadequate warnings if it knew or reasonably should have known of the risk in the exercise of ordinary care and failed to take precautions that a reasonable person would take in presenting the product to the public."

According to the statute, a postmarket duty to warn recognizes that, even when a product is not defective at the time of sale, a manufacturer may be subject to liability if it subsequently learns of the dangers associated with the product and fails to communicate that information to its users.

Evidence at trial established that Ford designed a fire-suppression kit and a trunk pack that it offered to law enforcement customers, indicating that it knew of the fuel tank risk prior to the sale of Linert's vehicle.

But the jury had ruled in favor of Ford with regard its knowledge of the risk prior to sale.

The high court's majority also held that Linert's claim failed for a second reason: He failed to establish the likelihood of the risk associated with the vehicle's gasoline tank.

"At best, we are presented with the contention, in Linert's merit brief, that there were six incidents in which Panther-platform vehicles caught fire as a result of a fuel-sender-unit failure, and Linert's counsel's more specific suggestion at oral argument that all six incidents involved Crown Victoria Police Interceptors," O'Connor wrote.

Even if the high court accepted that all six incidents involved the same vehicle as Linert's, it held that the evidence was "devoid of a sufficient context from which a jury could determine whether Ford acted unreasonably by failing to warn consumers of the risk of fire from sender-unit failures" in those vehicle because it did not know the circumstances that gave rise to the specific failure in the six cases on which Linert relied.

"More importantly, the Linerts have not sufficiently addressed the likelihood element of R.C. 2307.76(A)(2), by placing those six incidents in context of the number of Crown Victoria Police Interceptors that were in use at the time," O'Connor wrote.

The majority ultimately concluded that the trial court properly refused to instruct the jury on a postmarket duty to warn because the jury would not have had an adequate basis to find that the duty had been breached.

In his dissent, Justice William O'Neill held that the case was improvidently accepted by the high court and pointed out that there were actually 34 similar collisions involving the Ford police vehicles, six of which were nearly identical to the circumstances in Linert's case.

"After this police car was sold and delivered, Ford had a plethora of information, but users did not," O'Neill wrote.

The justice stated that he "could not disagree with the majority more vehemently" and held that the high court improperly ruled in favor of Ford on the basis of evidence that was for a jury to consider.

"Ultimately, citizens decide whether a manufacturer made a reasonable or an unreasonable postmarket decision about how risky a design might be," O'Neill wrote. "They weigh that solemn decision in light of the likelihood of harm and the seriousness of that harm as demonstrated by the evidence before them.

"We, as justices of a court of law, should not be fact-finders here."

Justice Paul Pfeifer dissented separately.

Justices Terrence O'Donnell, Judith Lanzinger, Sharon Kennedy and Judith French joined O'Connor to form the majority.

The matter was remanded to the Mahoning County court for it to reinstate its judgment in favor of Ford.

The case is cited Linert v. Foutz, Slip Opinion No. 2016-Ohio-8445.

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