Open the Books on Defects
The Assembly may soon take up a bill that would help warn the consumer about dangerous products before they kill or injure. But like many a good measure, full of promise in the spring, SB 11 could wither as Sacramento’s late-session summer heat draws swarms of special-interest lobbyists. A ruling by a Los Angeles trial judge late last month in a tire-separation rollover case is a welcome reminder to lawmakers of why they should pass an open records bill.
A jury in Judge Judith Chirlin’s courtroom in April awarded $55 million to a 33-year-old X-ray technician who was rendered quadriplegic in a 1996 accident caused by the separation of the tread from a tire. Lawyers for the woman asked the Los Angeles Superior Court judge to unseal detailed accounts of alleged safety problems at the Continental General Tire plant where the AmeriTech ST tire was manufactured. The tire company, of course, was demanding continued secrecy.
Defendants in product defect suits and other consumer cases routinely ask judges to close company records even when doing so means that other, unsuspecting consumers could be harmed by the same product. Defense attorneys often pressure plaintiffs--usually badly injured and strapped with enormous medical expenses--to agree to such secrecy pacts as the price of settling the case. Many judges comply even if plaintiff’s attorneys object. Chirlin, to her credit, did not.
Instead, she ruled that scores of documents from the trial be made public unless they reveal company trade secrets. The papers allegedly detail tire manufacturing problems and the efforts of employees to falsify safety inspections.
State law does not bar other judges from following suit, but there’s little incentive for them to buck the tide. They could be reversed--always humiliating--and each settlement they approve is a case cleared from their docket. SB 11 would help change that. The measure, by state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), would declare that it is state policy to release documents in cases involving a product defect, insurance fraud, environmental hazard or energy price manipulation.
Escutia’s bill cleared the Senate last month and is scheduled to be heard in the Assembly Judiciary Committee Aug. 21. But manufacturers, drug companies and insurance firms, bent on burying the measure as they have done with similar past efforts, are whispering in the ears of influential Assembly members. Those lawmakers should listen instead to the voices of injured consumers and pass this bill.
