ATLANTA (Legal Newsline) - Ford Motor Co. may have to defend itself against a lawsuit over a car design more than 10 years old after the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the state’s statute of repose contains an exception for “reckless” conduct - the latest setback in what's becoming a series in the state's courts.
Answering a question submitted to it by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the phrase “willful, reckless, or wanton disregard for life” represented three separate concepts, not a single description of a conscious choice to engage in behavior that harmed someone else.
Georgia’s statute of repose bars most product-liability lawsuits filed more than 10 years after a product was first sold, and Ford sought to dismiss a lawsuit in federal court over a Ford Explorer rollover accident that fatally injured Ronnie Ammerson in 2015. But legislators added an exception to the law in 1987 for lawsuits claiming “conduct which manifests a willful, reckless, or wanton disregard for life.”
The Georgia Supreme Court previously decided that the exception covered “willful disregard” for life or property but arguably left open the question of whether “reckless” conduct was also covered. Ford argued the word “or” in the phrase was a “willful, reckless, or wanton disregard” was a “term of art” that meant to encompass an “entire mindset” reflecting behavior that went beyond mere negligence.
The high court disagreed. While courts often used the three words together, the Supreme Court said, legislators clearly thought the terms could be separated since it passed a punitive-damages statute at the same time as the amendment to the statute of repose that included the words “willful” and “wantonness” but not “reckless.”
The 11th Circuit also asked the Georgia Supreme Court to define “reckless.” It cited the Restatement of Torts to describe reckless conduct as less culpable than “willful” or “wanton,” but more irresponsible than mere negligence. It “requires a conscious choice of a course of action either with knowledge of the serious danger to others involved in it or with knowledge of facts which would disclose this danger to any reasonable man,” the court ruled.
Ford lost a similar ruling by the Georgia Supreme Court last year after the court said the state’s “seatbelt statute” prohibited it from arguing in a federal lawsuit that the plaintiff wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, as required under another statute, when she hit her head against the windshield in an accident.
A Georgia jury last year socked Ford with a $1.7 billion punitive-damages verdict in another lawsuit over a rollover accident involving a F-250 pickup truck.