Vancouver man was left paralyzed after 1997 car crash
OLYMPIA — The state Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated an $8 million default judgment against Hyundai Motor Co. in a lawsuit over the backward collapse of a front seat in a 1997 crash that left a Vancouver man paralyzed.
In a 7-2 ruling, the high court reversed the Court of Appeals, which had overturned a trial court’s finding for Jesse Magaña.
The justices said the South Korean automaker deliberately withheld documentation from Magaña’s lawyers for too long concerning other crashes in which front seats collapsed backward.
“Trial courts need not tolerate deliberate and willful discovery abuse,” wrote the majority, led by Justice Richard Sanders. “This result appropriately compensates the other party, punishes Hyundai, and hopefully educates and deters others so inclined.”
The court also ruled that Hyundai should pay Magaña’s attorney’s fees and expenses.
Magaña, now 51 and an advocate for disability rights in Clark County and statewide, said he never lost faith in the court system.
“Here is a company that started out with lies,” he said. “You cannot allow that to happen and expect the truth to come out at the end. Without the politics, it would have been an easy decision.”
Magaña was riding in the front passenger seat of a rented 1996 Hyundai Accent when the driver swerved to avoid an oncoming truck and hit two trees. The force of the air bag apparently broke the seat’s reclining mechanism, and Magaña, who had been wearing a seat belt, was thrown out the back of the hatchback.
He was left a paraplegic, while a woman in the back seat wound up with a broken leg when the seat crashed down onto her.
In 2002, a Clark County Superior Court jury found that Hyundai’s seat design was faulty and awarded Magaña more than $8 million. That verdict was overturned in 2004 when an appellate panel found that Clark County Superior Court Judge Barbara Johnson should have told jurors to disregard testimony from a witness.
Two years later, just before the case was to go to trial a second time, Johnson rebuked Hyundai for failing to disclose seat-back failures in similar cases around the United States as required by pretrial procedures. She entered a default judgment against Hyundai.
In 2007, the state Court of Appeals overruled Johnson once again.
But the high court disagreed with the appellate court’s action, writing that the trial court “properly imposed a default judgment against Hyundai for its willful and deliberate failure to comply with discovery.”
Dissenting opinion
In his dissent, Supreme Court Justice James Johnson said that the trial court failed to consider available lesser sanctions other than a default judgment.
“This was an abuse of discretion,” Justice Johnson wrote, joined by Chief Justice Gerry Alexander.
He said that the right to a jury trial “may be set aside as a sanction only in the most extreme circumstances” and that this case did not meet those requirements.
“I’m really pleased, on a number of levels, that the jury’s verdict is reinstated,” Judge Barbara Johnson said late Wednesday afternoon. “They worked very hard. The way the opinion was written, I think the Supreme Court viewed the situation very much as I did.
“It’s a very strong opinion on the need for parties in litigation to comply with discovery obligations,” she said. “Attorneys that work in this area spend so much time on these voluminous materials. It’s courageous of the Supreme Court to say we take our discovery rules seriously.”
She said the $8 million verdict is certainly the largest in her career and “the largest single jury verdict we’ve had in Clark County. I’ve called it the Exxon Valdez of Clark County.”
Magaña, who uses a manual wheelchair to keep his upper body in shape, said he plans to use money from the jury award to buy a new wheelchair that will allow him to navigate sandy beaches without getting bogged down. He also plans to buy a special standing frame that will make it easier for him to exercise his joints.
He is a member of Disability Resources of Clark County, a committee that visits public and private facilities to evaluate whether they comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the Home Care Quality Authority, which sets up registries for home care providers.
Columbian reporter Kathie Durbin contributed to this story.
