Question

Does the Ford Pinto case deserve criminal punishment or civil punishment? Cite the specific details that lead you to your decision. Then, recommend a punishment for the corporation and any individuals you deem as culpable.

Answer 1

Ford PINTO CASE

Events in the 1970s related to the Ford Pinto automobile illustrate some of the ethical issues related to technology and safety. In an effort to produce a stylish but affordable subcompact automobile with a low operating cost, Ford Motor Company management made a questionable decision regarding the positioning of and protection for the fuel tank. A safer gas tank and tank location were technologically feasible, but consumer affordability and style took precedence over safety. Ford engineers were constrained by design and cost limitations, and the case therefore illustrates how engineering decisions are often made in the context of marketing strategies. For example, the car was designed to have a short rear-end, perhaps in imitation of the extremely popular Ford Mustang. This limited the engineers' alternatives for fuel tank safety and placement. The tank was placed behind the rear axle instead of over-the-axle, a safer location that had been used in the Ford Capri. Critics charged that this decision was a result of the reduction in trunk space caused by the over-the-axle placement. Another example of a limitation on the engineers was that management apparently mandated that the car cost no more than $2000 and weigh no more than 2000 pounds. If these limitations were really stipulated, then the engineers would have been constrained in many areas related to safety. Given these design and cost limitations, is it fair to hold the engineers morally responsible for the preventable pinto fire injuries and deaths? Other issues illustrated by the Pinto events relate to the definition of safety, the appropriate responsibilities and professional obligations of engineers, the interactions between different parts of organizations, ethical management decision-making, and effective government safety policies.

Ford produced the Pinto automobile from 1971 to 1980. Initially the car sold well, but a defect in early models made Pintos prone to leaking fuel and catching on fire after relatively low-speed, rear-end collisions. The Pinto's gasoline tank was located behind the rear axle. A rear-end collision of about twenty-eight miles per hour or more would crush the car's rear end, driving the fuel tank against the differential housing and causing it to split and the filler pipe to break loose. Sometimes the spilled fuel and sparks from the crash caused fires that produced fatalities or serious burns. Many such victims or their relatives filed civil suits against Ford Motor. This litigation generated damaging publicity for Ford and for the Pinto, and it increased public concern over fuel system integrity in general. In 1976 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) implemented a rear-impact safety regulation. The 1977 Pintos were in compliance with this standard, but earlier Pintos were not required to be in compliance and did not meet the standard. Responding to publicity about the Pinto's poor safety record, the NHTSA crash-tested some early Pintos and in 1978 announced that a safety defect existed in the fuel systems of 1971–1976 Pintos. With an NHTSA public hearing scheduled, Ford recalled the 1971–1976 Pintos to upgrade fuel system integrity.

The improvements to the 1977 and subsequent model-year Pintos and the recall of the earlier ones should have solved Ford's Pinto fuel system problems. In September 1978, however, an Indiana grand jury indicted Ford on three felony counts of reckless homicide. This indictment was related to an accident in which, after a van rear-ended a Pinto in an allegedly low-speed collision, three young women burned to death. In contrast to the previous Pinto cases, this one was a criminal trial, not a civil suit. Ford was found not guilty on all the charges because the corporation's lawyers persuaded the jury that the crash was not, in fact, a low-speed one, and hence the deaths did not result from Ford's having kept a lethal vehicle in production in spite of an obvious fatal flaw. Ford stopped producing the Pinto after 1980, having sold about 3 million of the vehicles.

Criminal Case

At this juncture, it might be asked what reason there is to belabor the complications of a civil action when this Pinto case was a criminal trial for reckless homicide. The short answer is that the criminal action can be placed in proper context only after its paired civil action is first understood. The ordinary mugging may form the basis of a tort or a crime, and the same is true with the complicated economic activities governed by the antitrust law. The details of the pairing should not conceal one proposition. It is, and it should be, a lot more difficult to obtain a criminal conviction than to recover damages in a civil action. Most obviously, this difference is reflected in the different burdens of proof. In a civil suit, the plaintiff must normally prove his case by a bare preponderance of the evidence; the criminal prosecution must meet the higher standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Central to the Pinto case, however, were the substantive differences between the civil and criminal rules of responsibility for certain types of acts. Broadly speaking, only in the criminal case is it necessary to prove, in addition to some harmful act, that the accused acted with the requisite guilty mental state—with the so-called mens rea or criminal intent. In some cases the importance of criminal intent to the distinction between tort and crime is easy enough to draw: A hunter shoots at a deer in the woods only to wound some unseen hunter. He may well be held civilly responsible for all unintended harm, but his want of any intention to harm completely frees him of criminal responsibility, no matter how serious the consequences of his shooting.

The mental element so germane to the ordinary criminal shooting case is also essential to criminal prosecutions in crashworthiness situations. But with crashworthiness it is far more difficult to pin down what the mental state of the corporation (or at least its principal agents) must be. The problem is not, it must be stressed, that rules of criminal responsibility cannot be applied to manufacturers of dangerous products. If Ford’s directors ordered its workers to build cars with bombs set to go off after 10,000 miles of use, it would be a simple case of murder. If the Pinto had that explosive property but Ford refused, out of utter indifference for its customers’ safety, to conduct any safety tests to discover it, then a case of reckless disregard could be made out, even if the specific intent to cause harm were absent. Yet here, too, we have nothing in the record that remotely suggests this pattern of behavior.

The pattern of proof in this case was really quite different. In essence, the charge of recklessness rested on two separate types of allegations: first, the knowledge of Ford’s officials that some burn injuries could be avoided by redesigning or relocating the gas tanks; second, that with this knowledge, Ford acted in conscious disregard of human life by reducing costs instead of saving lives. My thesis is that the combined force of these two propositions was insufficient to support any criminal prosecution. What was needed at the very least was a showing that Ford acted in bad faith by marketing the car as it stood, because its own officials in fact believed that its design was unreasonably dangerous. To require anything less would be to collapse the standards for criminal liability in design cases into those applicable to civil liability.

Our earlier discussion makes the basic point. The main purpose of the recent judicial intervention in design-defect cases is to force the manufacturer to make conscious trade-offs between the harm of accidents and the costs of their prevention. The rules of civil liability, as developed, in effect contemplate that there will be—and should be—certain accidents that will certainly take place, but for which the manufacturer will not—and should not—be liable, even though he knows that they must occur. Such are the inescapable consequences of the “balancing” formulas used to judge whether manufacturers have complied with their affirmative duty to prevent automobile occupants from being harmed by the acts of third parties.

When, therefore, the prosecution said that Ford had made a conscious choice to “trade” cost against safety, the answer is that this is precisely what the tort law (with use of the more neutral word “balance”) establishes as the limit of its legal obligation—and, as we have seen, a newly extended limit at that. When the prosecution said that the defendant had used explicit cost-benefit formulas or had assigned monetary values to human life and suffering, the answer is that Ford did so in compliance with court decisions announcing that such computations will avoid civil liability. When the prosecution said that Ford refused to install a $10 part in each of 20,000,000 vehicles in order to prevent an estimated 180 deaths and a like number of injuries, the answer is that it made the right decision, as defined by the rules of civil liability, if the value attached to those deaths and those injuries was less than $200,000,000. It cannot—should not—be the law that Ford may first be permitted (if not required) to make certain cost-benefit calculations under the tort law, only then and for that reason to be held guilty of reckless homicide under the criminal law. Nor, it must quickly be added, should it make the slightest difference to a criminal case if Ford’s calculations are regarded as erroneous, so long as they resulted from an honest mistake.

At this point the weight of the evidence presented against Ford can be better assessed. The testimony of the various prosecution witnesses was not, as best as can be told from the popular accounts, any different from the very type of evidence that would be introduced against Ford in an ordinary crashworthiness case. At the most, that evidence might make out the wrongful omission of Ford—its failure to build a reasonably safe car under the applicable social standards. But that is wholly unrelated to the mental element of the case. To establish criminal intent in the narrowest sense, it must be shown not that the prosecution’s experts knew how to build a car that could resist their own critique, but that the defendants thought they had built a car that was unsafe. To establish reckless disregard, it must be shown not that the prosecution’s experts thought that Ford should have spent additional sums on safety, but that Ford’s own employees knew of the substantial risk that they would make an unreasonably safe car, and refused even to consider how that car might be redesigned to bring it within acceptable safety standards. Neither of these mental elements is made out, for example, by proof that federal automotive officials decided in 1978 that the 1973 Ford Pinto should be recalled for safety modifications. Instead it must be shown that when Ford first marketed the Pinto in 1973, it believed that the car should never have been sold. In this regard, the crucial testimony had to be that of MacDonald, Ford’s engineer in the case—which, if believed, required Ford’s acquittal. The issue was not whether a relocation of the gas tank was better for all concerned, but whether MacDonald believed that such was the case. The issue was not whether the balancing of risks against costs showed that some bladder should be inserted in the fuel tank, but whether MacDonald believed that such was the case. The fact that Ford’s engineers used the cars for their own families, that the car met all federal safety standards when produced, and that it conformed to the general industry standards, might not have saved Ford from onerous civil liability, but it surely had to be dispositive upon the criminal case. It is, in sum, simply wrong to think that “trading” costs for lives or making conscious decisions about the lives to be sacrificed (or, to be more accurate, not saved from third-party harm) establishes all the elements of a criminal case.

It cannot—should not—be the law that Ford may first be permitted (if not required) to make certain cost-benefit calculations under the tort law, only then … to be held guilty of reckless homicide under the criminal law.

The incurable weaknesses of the prosecution’s theory of criminal responsibility can be shown by a closer examination of the allegations in the indictment it procured against Ford. The prosecution’s litigation strategy might have been clever in singling out Ford for criminal responsibility; yet there was nothing in the theory of the case that so limited the scope of criminality. A corporation cannot act by itself, but only through its agents. So much was recognized in the indictment, which claimed that Ford’s various acts of reckless homicide were done “through the acts and omissions of its agents and employees.” These acts in turn would expose Ford to criminal liability only if performed with the same reckless disregard that is then imputed to the corporation as an entity. If therefore Ford was to be subject to criminal fines, it would only have been because its officers and engineers were subject to both fines and imprisonment for their design choices. It was of course more than prosecutorial squeamishness that kept these Ford officials from prosecution. It was the good faith character of their judgment, which was necessarily decisive in Ford’s behalf as well.

Nor did the basic theory allow the prosecution to limit its dragnet to Ford’s own officials. Federal automotive officials had clear responsibility for approving the design of the Pinto. They therefore had to make the same cost-benefit analysis required of Ford in order to discharge their statutory duties. They also had to set some value on human life in order to determine what precautions were needed and why. If they did not set standards that could in fact have saved lives, did they not sacrifice human life every bit as much as Ford officials? And since these officials were guilty of criminal conduct, why was not their employer, the United States, as guilty as Ford?

There was yet a second way in which the indictments could have been extended. As will be recalled, the second count of the indictment accused Ford of “recklessly creating a risk of substantial harm” to the three young women who perished in the crash. There is, of course, no reason to suppose that the risks created to these three women were any different in kind from those created by sales of other 1973 Pintos to other consumers. It follows, therefore, that the deaths in these cases and the circumstances that led to them were quite immaterial to the criminality of the Ford Motor Company—and, for that matter, of all others drawn into the sphere of criminal responsibility. By the prosecution’s theory, the sale itself became criminal and could be treated as such by a simple amendment of the indictment. The deaths were but a dramatic detail that might aggravate the crime and arouse the passions, but nothing more.

These prosecutions were defective from still another standpoint. Under Indiana law, the jury was charged with deciding for itself the “acceptable” standard of safety for a Ford Pinto. The wide discretion thereby created violates one of the standard precepts of the criminal law, that persons subject to penalty be given fair notice of what conduct is legally forbidden. It has been held, for example, that a court cannot, without statutory basis, punish as a crime the making of obscene phone calls—even though such conduct is grossly indecent. How then was the notice requirement discharged as regards Ford? Surely it cannot be enough that Ford knew that it was under a duty not to make an “unreasonably dangerous” vehicle. That standard would have provided the jury with the enormous latitude of deciding whether this car should have been able to withstand a twenty or forty mile-per-hour rear-end impact. What possible notice is there when any jury can with perfect propriety decide—as is all too often the case in civil crashworthiness cases—any criminal case any way it wants? Adequate notice demands some specificity of the standards that can in this context be supplied by statute or regulation, or possibly standard industry practice. We need not enter into the complications that arise when these standards are violated. It is enough to say that compliance with them must give Ford an enormous litigation advantage that was completely denied it under the prosecution’s theory of the case.

The consequences that flow from the prosecution’s theory of criminal liability only confirm what should now be evident: the Pinto case should not have been brought within the traditional modes of criminal responsibility. Such is not to rule out all possibility for public control over the production and sale of automobiles. There is nothing, for example, to prevent federal or state governments from bringing suit for civil fines in the event that automobile manufacturers do not conform to applicable safety standards. Such civil actions spare the government the need to prove explosive allegations of “reckless disregard and criminal intention,” and give it the benefit of the lower standard of proof normally involved in civil cases. Of equal importance, they prevent any corporate defendant from being subjected to the deep moral taint that is associated in the public mind with charges of criminal wrong-doing. It is true that many of the hazards associated with criminal prosecution might be avoided by circumspection in invoking the criminal sanctions. Yet in the current climate of opinion it seems almost fanciful to rely upon notions of prosecutorial self-restraint. Such self-restraint will deny to some what is, after all, the joyous opportunity of both making and seeing the mighty fall.

What was wrong with the Ford Pinto:

On May 8, 1978, the NHTSA informed Ford of their determination that the Pinto fuel system was defective. ... 1971–1976 Ford Pintos have experienced moderate speed, rear-end collisions that have resulted in fuel tank damage, fuel leakage, and fire occurrences that have resulted in fatalities and non-fatal burn injuries ...

How much money did Ford lost in the Pinto case

Ford Motor Co. wishes he had stayed on the links. Last week, jury foreman Quinn read in state Superior Court here a verdict assessing $125 million in punitive damages against Ford in a case involving the rupour and explosion of the fuel tank on a 1975 Pinto

How many people died because of Ford Pinto

Reports range from 27 to 180 deaths as a result of rear-impact-related fuel tank fires in the Pinto, but given the volume of more than 2.2 million vehicles sold, the death rate was not substantially different from that of vehicles by Ford's competitors. The far more damaging result for Ford was the PR disaster

What moral issues does the Pinto case raise

Ford Pinto case raises moral issue regarding withholding information and ignoring human rights for the sake of earning profit. Pinto used the data from NHSTA to analyze the cost-benefit analysis, and they ignore the safety of their customers.

Who was the president of Ford Motor Company during the Pinto disaster

Iacocca

In 1970, Iacocca became president of Ford. The Pinto quickly became known as "Lee's car." He demanded that it weigh no more than 2,000 pounds and sell for $2,000.

How much money did Ford lost in the Pinto case

Ford Motor Co. wishes he had stayed on the links. Last week, jury foreman Quinn read in state Superior Court here a verdict assessing $125 million in punitive damages against Ford in a case involving the rupour and explosion of the fuel tank on a 1975 Pinto