Million dollar personal injury verdict is affirmed on appeal

This personal injury case against BMW went to trial in federal court. The plaintiff lost part of his thumb because the car automatically shuts the door under its "sort close" feature when the door is six millimeters from being closed. The lawsuit was filed under the General Business Law, which prohibits consumer fraud, and general personal injury principles. The Court of Appeals upholds the verdict.

The case is Boateng v. BMW, a summary order issued on November 10. The "soft close" feature is one of those bells and whistles that automobile manufacturers put into the car that only cause more problems later on, and when they stop working you have to pay a fortune to have it fixed. 

BMW argued that plaintiff should not have won the trial because "(1) it is a matter of common sense that fingers and body parts should not be put in the path of closing doors, (2) warnings in the car’s owner’s manual adequately warned of the risk of amputation-like injuries, (3) and even though BMW had received numerous customer reports of injuries from soft close doors, there was no omission of material information because soft close doors are supposedly statistically no more dangerous than normal doors and the number of customer complaints was relatively small." 

The jury was able to reject these defenses, the Court of Appeals (Lynch, Nardini and Menashi) holds, because the evidence shows that soft close doors are designed to exert substantially more force (134.885 to 224.809 pounds) than the amount of force required to fracture a thumb (95 to 100 pounds), and that the doors would stop for certain obstructions—like a steel bar—but not a finger.  The jury was also able to find that the "common sense" argument fails because a reasonable consumer would not know there was any risk of amputation upon accident activation of the soft close doors. And the jury was also able to find that the soft-related warning in the owner's manual, which warned of a "danger of pinching," was not enough to put someone on notice that they might risk amputation. 

The jury awarded plaintiff more than $250,00 in lost wages. That amount is fair, the Court says, in light of plaintiff's salary, the extent of his work week, and losing 56 weeks of work. 

As for pain and suffering, the jury awarded him $800,000 for past pain and suffering, and $850,000 in future pain and suffering. Under New York law, these amounts do not significantly deviate from prior awards in similar cases. The trial court, in reaching the same result, noted there are different kinds of amputation injuries: there is the sharp injury and there is the crush injury, like plaintiffs. And the less said about these injuries, the better. You also don't want to know about the cases summaries in this opinion that the Second Circuit cited in upholding plaintiff's damages awards. Suffice to say, these cases are brutal. Bottom line is that plaintiff's damages award is in line with the crush injury verdicts.