Appellate Court Affirms Summary Judgment in Delphi Corporation Case

The First District Appellate Court affirmed summary judgment on behalf of Johnson & Bell client Delphi Electronics in a case involving a 33-year-old woman who suffered double above-the-knee amputations.  The car she had recently purchased from a second Defendant had stalled allegedly due to a defective Delphi electronic control module.  As she and her husband were pushing the car off the road, a drunk driver struck and pinned her between the rear of her car and front of his.   The Court’s decision turned on its analysis of the two-pronged issue of proximate cause, holding that there was little doubt that the allegedly defective control module was a cause-in-fact of the injury.  However, in deciding if the device failure was a legal cause of the accident, the Court considered the 20-30 minute time lapse between the stall and accident, the fact that several cars had passed by Plaintiffs safely, and that the road was straight, well-lit, low-speed, and semi-residential. The Court concluded that from those facts, the device failure was not a legal cause and the Plaintiffs could not fulfill that prong of the test of proximate causation.  The device failure was a mere condition that provided a time and place at which the gross misconduct of the drunk driver reached fruition.   The Court did not find it necessary to reach Defendants’ second argument that it did not owe a duty to protect others from criminal acts of third parties.  Johnson & Bell Shareholders Timothy R. Couture obtained summary judgment in the Circuit Court and Shareholder Garrett L. Boehm, Jr. handled the appeal.