A federal appeals panel has revived a lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler brought by the family of a woman who claimed she was injured when her airbag failed to deploy during a rollover crash.
The appeals panel determined a judge had improperly limited witness testimony.
The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued its opinion April 8, undoing a decision by U.S. District Judge Sara Darrow, in the Central District of Illinois, granting summary judgment to the automaker.
U.S. District Judge Sara Darrow
| U.S. District Court for the Central District Of Illinois
The appellate opinion was authored by Seventh Circuit Judge Ilana D. Rovner. Circuit judges Kenneth F. Ripple and Michael Y. Scudder concurred.
The original plaintiff, Donna Bensenberg, was 85 years old the day of the crash in September 2015. According to court documents, Bensenberg had a medical incident that caused her to lose consciousness while driving a 2008 Chrysler Aspen on Wolf Road outside of Geneseo in western Illinois. The side curtain airbag deployed but the front airbag didn’t, and although the seat belt functioned properly, her body hit the steering wheel and column. The result was an undisplaced fracture of her second cervical vertebra.
Bensenberg sued Fiat Chrysler Automotive in 2017. She died in November 2018 of causes unrelated to the rollover; her son Bradley Bensenburg is continuing the litigation. The only counts remaining on appeal are strict liability claims based on allegations of a manufacturing defect in the airbag system.
Ilana Rovner wrote the panel’s opinion, Judges Kenneth Ripple and Michael Scudder concurred.
According to Rovner, Judge Darrow granted summary judgment to FCA because Bensenberg’s expert — University of California-Davis mechanical engineering professor Bahram Ravani — didn’t identify “any purported defect in the airbag system.”
However, Rovner explained, “Illinois recognizes a claim for non-specific defect, which, in the appropriate case, relieves the plaintiff of the obligation to identify a particular defect in the product in order to make a prima facie case of product liability.”
If a plaintiff can show the product failed to perform as expected, provided it wasn’t being used abnormally and in the absence of secondary failure causes, they “may instead resort to circumstantial evidence that supports an inference that the product was defective.”
Bensenberg alleged the front airbag was supposed to deploy if the vehicle struck a fixed object while traveling at least 16 mph. Witnesses, including a state police officer, placed the Aspen’s speed between 45 and 65 mph when it entered the ditch, and the vehicle’s electric data recorder show it going 53 mph. Although the recorder stopped logging data when the side airbag deployed, “Ravani opined that when the vehicle struck the post, it was likely traveling at a rate closer to 53 mph than to five or 10 mph — in other words, above the 16 mph mandatory deployment threshold for the front airbag,” Rovner wrote.
The panel rejected FCA’s arguments Bensenberg waived certain claims, finding he included the relevant information in his memorandum opposing summary judgment. It also rejected FCA’s contention the vehicle’s age and use precluded a manufacturing defect, saying “nothing in this record suggest that the lifespan of a modern airbag is shorter than the seven to eight years this vehicle was in use” before the rollover.
The panel acknowledged Judge Wood’s “failure to appreciate the nature of the theory that Bensenberg was pursuing may well have been due to the lack of clarity in his briefing,” but nonetheless agreed he sufficiently preserved his allegations on appeal. Expert testimony was needed, the panel said, to demonstrate the vehicle’s speed after the data recorder stopped logging. And although an FCA expert surmised the vehicle was traveling too slow to trigger the front airbag, the automaker didn’t argue Ravani’s methodology was flawed or inadmissible.
The ultimate question, the panel concluded, is whether Bensenberg’s allegation can survive a motion for summary judgment without Ravani identifying a specific defect in the airbag system other than it should’ve worked given the speed he deduced the car was traveling at the moment of impact. Since Illinois law permits that type of allegation, the panel reversed Darrow’s judgment and sent the case back to Darrow for further proceedings.
Bensenberg has been represented by attorneys Charles A. Bonner and Adam C. Bonner, of the Law Offices of Bonner & Bonner, of Sausalito, California.
FCA has been defended by attorney Brian W. Bell, and others with the firm of Swanson Martin & Bell, of Chicago.