Judge to GM: Do I Have to Arrest You?

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Sometimes it takes a threat of jail time for corporate lawyers to abide by
the law. 

Attorneys for General Motors, threatened with imprisonment for contempt,
last month turned over internal documents that are likely to undermine the
giant automaker's defense in product liability cases around the country. 

In Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Broward County Judge Arthur Franza ordered GM
to turn over the documents in a lawsuit brought by the parents of 13-year
old Shane McGee. Shane was killed in 1991 when the fuel tank in the 1983
Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon he was riding in burst into flames after
being struck in the rear by another vehicle. 

GM fought to keep the documents secret, but at a showdown hearing on
February 5, Judge Franza threatened "very severe sanctions" if GM did not
obey his order. 

Pursuant to a subpoena, GM's in-house attorney Glenn Jackson appeared
before Judge Franza on that day, but did not bring with him the documents
that Franza had ordered him to bring to court. Jackson, GM's case manager
for the McGee lawsuit, told the Judge that GM would not give him the
documents to bring to trial. 

"Do I have to arrest you, and book you, and put you on bond and release
you?" Judge Franza asked Jackson. "I am warning you all and your client to
produce these documents by Monday. Let me tell you, if you don't, there is
going to be some very severe sanctions, and I mean very severe. I don't
think General Motors is big enough to thumb its nose at the Court. I don't
think they are big enough to obstruct justice or to conceal evidence." 

On February 9, GM finally produced the documents that it had sought for
years to keep secret. Judge Franza conducted an evidentiary review, and
ordered a number of them admitted into evidence. 

The legal skirmishing centers around a dispute between two former General
Motors engineers, Edward Ivey and Ronald Elwell. 

On June 29, 1973, Ivey, then an engineer at Oldsmobile, prepared a
two-page report and calculated that fatalities related to fuel-fed fires
were costing GM $2.40 per automobile. 

Ivey multiplied 500 fatalities times an estimated $200,000 per fatality
($100 million) and divided that by 41 million automobiles. "This cost will
be with us until a way of preventing all crash related fuel-fed fires is
developed," Ivey concluded. 

The Ivey report, as it is known, has been used by plaintiffs attorneys
against GM in fuel-fed fire cases for almost 10 years now. But there has
been an ongoing dispute between Ivey and Elwell about why Ivey prepared
the report and what he meant by it. 

Elwell, a retired GM engineer and whistleblower, testified in the McGee
case that in 1981, the Ivey report appeared on his desk at General Motors
in a plain brown envelope. Elwell said that the Ivey report had on it a
cover sheet which showed it was distributed to GM management. 

Elwell testified that after reading the report, he met Ivey in an
Oldsmobile garage and Ivey told him he prepared the report at the request
of GM management "because General Motors wanted to know how much they
could spend on fuel systems." 

Ivey says he had never met with Elwell and that he did not know why he
prepared the report or who asked him to prepare it. "I don't remember
anyone asking me to write it and I don't believe anyone did," Ivey said. 

In May 1997, McGee's attorney sought from GM any documents relating to the
Ivey report. GM said that no such documents existed. 

But after the February 5 showdown, GM produced the documents, one of which
is a legal summary of an interview conducted with Ivey on November 3,
1981. 

In that document, GM attorneys conclude that "Ivey is not an individual
whom we would ever, in any conceivable situation, want to be identified"
to plaintiffs attorneys in fuel-fed fire cases "and the documents he
generated are undoubtedly some of the potentially most harmful and most
damaging were they ever to be produced." 

This document also appears to contradict Ivey's claim that he doesn't know
why he prepared the report. In the document prepared by GM attorneys, Ivey
said he wrote the report "for Oldsmobile management" and engineers to
"assist them in 'trying to figure out how much Olds could spend on fuel
systems.'" 

GM doesn't want anyone to think it was a cheapskate, unwilling to spend
more than $2.40 per car to fix the problem. In a statement last week, GM
said that "a dollar value cannot be placed on human life" and that "any
suggestion that GM does not care about occupant and product safety is
reprehensible and couldn't be further from the truth." 

Whatever you say, big boy. 


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor.

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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