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Defective airbag sensor causes crash

Jury Trial

Attorney Ed Ricci tried the first defective airbag case in U.S. history. His client, the family of Jerome Brown, brought a case against General Motors. Brown was driving a Corvette and it hit a pothole, which caused the airbag to inflate – this shouldn't have happened. The sensors were defective. The inflation of the airbag caused Mr. Brown to crash his car, which flipped over, and he was killed.

In pursuing this case, Ricci discovered that GM was inaccurately analyzing their data. Before this, auto manufacturers would grab the crash data from the computers in the vehicles involved and nobody else got to see this information. This case set the precedent that consumers would now have the right to the data in the computer in their car. The data belonged to them, the driver. Now auto makers could not alter or incorrectly report the crash data from the vehicle. Rush Limbaugh reported this case in one of his broadcasts and Ricci authored an article “Preserve Black-Box Data.”

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