Report finds Top 10 jury verdicts totaled nearly $9 billion

BOSTON (AP) -- Punitive damages made up nearly 90 percent of the top 10 biggest jury verdicts awarded to individuals and families in<br>1999, reflecting what legal experts said was an increasing comfort

Tuesday, January 11th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

BOSTON (AP) -- Punitive damages made up nearly 90 percent of the top 10 biggest jury verdicts awarded to individuals and families in
1999, reflecting what legal experts said was an increasing comfort by jurors to use punitive verdicts to punish negligence.
Last year's top 10 verdicts added to a stunning $8.86 billion -- three times 1998's total of $2.8 million -- and 12 times 1997's total of nearly $862 million.

"I think that what jurors are doing that they didn't do before is they are saying, `Let's regulate the industry. Let's send a message to the entire industry that they're on notice,"' said
Thomas Harrison, publisher of the Boston-based Lawyers Weekly USA, which assembled the list.

The annual list of top jury awards included verdicts to individuals and families and excluded class action lawsuits or litigation between corporations.

Punitive damages accounted for 88 percent of 1999's total, up significantly from 1998 when they made up for 72 percent. In 1997,
punitive damages were 68 percent of total verdicts.

The awards come as the controversy over whether punitive damages should be capped continues. Following one of 1999's largest
verdicts -- in which an Alabama jury awarded $581 million to a rural family that claimed a bank and an electronics company tried to
gouge them out of $1,200 on the sale of two $1,100 satellite dishes in 1995 -- the Alabama Legislature passed a package of bills to
place limits on punitive damage verdicts.

In 1996 Congress passed bills to limit punitive damages, saying the high limits raised product prices and affected corporations' research and development activities. President Clinton vetoed the bills.

The biggest verdict on the 1999 list was awarded by a Los Angeles jury to a group of six people severely burned when their 1979 Chevy Malibu was rear-ended by a drunken driver and exploded into flames. General Motors Corporation was ordered to pay $4.9
billion. Of that, $4.8 billion was punitive damages.