Victims of G.M. Deadly Defect Fall Through Legal Cracks – New York Times
By Barry Meier
In the end, the defect’s public disclosure — and the recall of 2.2 million G.M. vehicles in the United States — was set in motion by a lawsuit filed in Georgia, a state that does not place strict caps on damages in product liability lawsuits.
“It increases the ability of a plaintiff to bring a claim,” said the lawyer, Lance Cooper of Marietta, Ga., who filed a lawsuit in 2011 in the case of 29-year-old Brooke Melton, who died in a Chevrolet Cobalt crash.
Initially, Mr. Cooper thought that Ms. Melton had lost control of her vehicle when its power steering failed. G.M. lawyers also did not move to settle the case since it involved a side impact collision, so the car’s airbags would not have been expected to deploy. In other accidents, a failure of the airbags to deploy was a telltale sign that the vehicle’s ignition had powered off.