OLYMPIA, Wash. -- The state Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated an $8 million default judgment against Hyundai Motor Co. in a lawsuit over the backward collapse of a front seat in a 1997 crash that left a man paralyzed.
In a 7-2 ruling, the high court reversed the Court of Appeals, which had overturned a trial court's finding for Jesse Magana of Vancouver.
The justices said the South Korean automaker deliberately withheld documentation from Magana's lawyers for too long concerning other crashes in which front seats collapsed backward.
"Trial courts need not tolerate deliberate and willful discovery abuse," wrote the majority, led by Justice Richard Sanders. "This result appropriately compensates the other party, punishes Hyundai, and hopefully educates and deters others so inclined."
The court also ruled that Hyundai should pay Magana's attorney's fees and expenses.
Magana was riding in the front passenger seat of a rented 1996 Hyundai Accent when the driver swerved to avoid an oncoming truck and hit two trees. The force of the air bag apparently broke the seat's reclining mechanism, and Magana, who had been wearing a seat belt, was thrown out the back of the hatchback.
He was left a paraplegic, while a woman in the back seat wound up with a broken leg when the seat crashed down onto her.
In 2002, a Clark County Superior Court jury found that Hyundai's seat design was faulty and awarded Magana more than $8 million. That verdict was overturned in 2004 when an appellate panel found that Judge Barbara Johnson should have told jurors to disregard testimony from a witness.
Two years later, just before the case was to go to trial a second time, Johnson rebuked Hyundai for failing to disclose seat-back failures in similar cases around the United States as required by pretrial procedures. She entered a default judgment against Hyundai.
In 2007, the state Court of Appeals overruled Johnson once again.
But the high court disagreed with the appellate court's action, writing that the trial court "properly imposed a default judgment against Hyundai for its willful and deliberate failure to comply with discovery."
In his dissent, Justice James Johnson said that the trial court failed to consider available lesser sanctions other than a default judgment.
"This was an abuse of discretion," Johnson wrote, joined by Chief Justice Gerry Alexander.
Johnson said that the right to a jury trial "may be set aside as a sanction only in the most extreme circumstances" and that this case did not meet those requirements.
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