On April 13, 2004, Mr. Mraz suffered fatal head injuries when the 1992 Dodge Dakota pickup truck he had been driving at his work site, the San Pedro/Long Beach Maritime Terminal, ran him over after he exited the vehicle believing it was in park.

The jury found that a defect in the Dodge Dakota’s automatic transmission, called a park-to-reverse defect, played a substantial factor in Mr. Mraz’s death and that DaimlerChrysler was negligent in the design of the vehicle. Mr. Mraz was only 38 years old when he died, and left behind a wife and three children.

The case is significant beyond the tragedy suffered by the Mraz family. The defect that caused the death of Mr. Mraz affects over a million vehicles on the road today, including 1988 to 2003 Dodge Dakota pickup trucks and 1993-1998 Jeep Grand Cherokees.

Unfortunately, DaimlerChrysler’s response in published reports has been to continue to blame Mr. Mraz for the accident. This is precisely the kind of blame game the jury found an inadequate answer to a serious public safety threat. DaimlerChrysler’s ongoing indifference to public safety was what prompted the jury to find that DaimlerChrysler acted with malice and with a conscious disregard for the health and safety of others.

Mr. Mraz was not the first person to die from this defect, but likely the thirteenth person. There have been hundreds of accidents where people suffered debilitating physical injuries when the DaimlerChrysler vehicles they were driving moved into reverse when the driver believed that he or she had placed the shift selector of the vehicle in the park position.

At trial, the eyewitness testimony was that Mr. Mraz was out of the vehicle and several feet away from the vehicle when the vehicle started to move in reverse. The evidence also showed that if the vehicle had been placed in reverse, it would have begun to move immediately; if Mr. Mraz had put the vehicle in reverse, there would be no way Mr. Mraz could be out of the vehicle and several feet away when the vehicle began to move.

Plaintiffs showed that a driver can place the vehicle into what appears to be the park position and the vehicle remains stationary for several seconds and sometimes longer — even after the driver removes his foot from the brake and exits the vehicle. From this position, the vehicle can have a dangerous delayed engagement of powered reverse, and, in the case of Mr. Mraz, the vehicle ran over him once he had exited the vehicle.

The evidence plaintiffs presented at trial included the fact that DaimlerChrysler was aware of well over a thousand park-to-reverse complaints in several of their vehicles with the same defective transmission.

When DaimlerChrysler finally determined that it had to do something about the problem in 2000 due to an ongoing National Highway Transportation & Safety Administration investigation of the Dodge Dakota truck, it engaged in an inexpensive recall that DaimlerChrysler’s engineers knew and testified would not fix the problem. Indeed, in addition to finding that the vehicle was defective, the jury also found that DaimlerChrysler was negligent in failing to adequately recall or retrofit the Dodge Dakota that killed Mr. Mraz.

DaimlerChrysler had twenty years to fix the park to reverse transmission defect in the Dodge Dakota that lead to Mr. Mraz’s death in 2004. Refusing to act as a responsible corporate citizen and falsely blaming Mr. Mraz for his own death explains why the jury imposed $50 million in punitive damages against DaimlerChrysler.

If anything, the Mraz case is an example of comparative fault at work. Regardless of the mechanics of an automatic shifting from P to R, Chrysler acknowledged some problem when it issued the recall.

In any event, it’s an interesting story – not to mention it reads like a torts exam hypothetical.

Q: What do you think about blah blah blah?

A: Well, blah blah blah.

Judges have the power to do so, but only under certain circumstances and it is rarely used.