Chrysler Corp. v. Blackmon

• Decision Date: 14 October 1992
• Docket Number: No. D-1637,D-1637
• Citation: 36 Tex.Sup.Ct.J. 76,841 S.W.2d 844
• Parties: CHRYSLER CORPORATION, Relator, v. The Honorable Robert BLACKMON, Judge, Respondent.
• Court: Texas Supreme Court

Page 844

841 S.W.2d 844

CHRYSLER CORPORATION, Relator, v. The Honorable Robert BLACKMON, Judge, Respondent.

No. D-1637.

Supreme Court of Texas.

Oct. 14, 1992.

Rehearing Overruled Dec. 31, 1992.

Ronald B. Brin, Richard W. Crews, Jr., Corpus Christi, Richard A. Salomon, Chicago, Ill., Richard Josephson, Dallas, Travis J. Sales, Houston, Joe R. Greenhill and Bob E. Shannon, Austin, for relator.

David L. Perry, Mikal C. Watts, Corpus Christi, Franklin S. Spears, San Antonio, Charles B. Lord, C.L. Ray, Austin and Elaine Stone, Corpus Christi, for respondent.

OPINION

CORNYN, Justice.

In this product liability suit, Chrysler Corporation seeks a Writ of Mandamus directing the Honorable Robert Blackmon, Judge of the 117th District Court, Nueces County, Texas, to vacate his Order Regarding Plaintiffs' Amended Motion for Sanctions Against Chrysler for Discovery Abuse (Sanctions Order) by which he struck Chrysler's pleadings and rendered a default judgment against Chrysler on all issues of liability for both compensatory and punitive damages. ¹ Chrysler claims that the trial court's Sanctions Order violates the standards for the imposition of "death penalty" discovery sanctions, those that terminate the presentation of the merits of a party's claims, that we recently adopted in Transamerican Natural Gas Corp. v. Powell, 811 S.W.2d 913 (Tex.1991, orig. proceeding) and Braden v. Downey, 811 S.W.2d 922 (Tex.1991, orig. proceeding).

Ambrocio Garcia Jr. was killed on July 26, 1986, when a drunk driver drove across the median and hit Garcia's Dodge Diplomat head-on. Garcia's family filed this wrongful death suit against Chrysler and the estate of the driver, alleging, among other things, that the Dodge Diplomat was defective because it was not crashworthy.

The parties acknowledge that the standards for appellate review of discovery sanctions announced in Transamerican Natural Gas Corp. v. Powell and Braden v. Downey control this proceeding, including a party's right to mandamus relief if a violation of those standards is demonstrated. ² We consider, then, whether the record demonstrates a violation of those standards.

I.

This record painfully illustrates the problems of modern discovery practice and the attendant expenses and difficulties of judicial administration, at all levels, especially in complex litigation. From April 10, 1989, when the Garcias served Chrysler with their first request for discovery, until August 8, 1991, when the trial court granted a default judgment against Chrysler on liability, the Garcias served five discovery requests on Chrysler. Chrysler served five responses, including objections to those requests. The Garcias filed three Motions to Compel Discovery and for Sanctions, and the parties participated in seven hearings on discovery disputes before three district judges. By the time the Sanctions Order was signed, Chrysler claims to have produced more than 80,000 documents, made 100,000 more available for inspection, and to have spent more than $250,000 in the process. ³ The parties have filed with this court twelve volumes of exhibits, including motions, responses, transcripts of hearings, correspondence, and affidavits, which they ask us to consider in assessing the propriety of the Sanctions Order.

The record reflects that the Garcias first served Chrysler with three discovery requests, including requests for admission, requests for production, and interrogatories to which Chrysler responded with answers and objections, leading to a hearing on the Motion to Compel Discovery on April 12, 1990. Admirably, the parties settled "probably 70 per cent" of their differences before the hearing, and submitted only the remaining issues for the court's determination. Ultimately, the parties submitted an Agreed Order On Motion to Compel Discovery to the trial court, which it signed on June 13, 1990, resolving all their differences on the Garcias' first, second, and third requests for discovery. The Agreed Order granted no sanctions.

On the same day that the trial court signed the parties' Agreed Order, the Garcias served Chrysler with Plaintiffs' Second Motion to Compel Discovery, Motion for Sanctions, and Motion for Entry of Order. The court convened a hearing on the Garcias' Second Motion to Compel on August 30, 1990. The "hearing," as it turned out, consisted of an announcement of counsels' agreement that Chrysler would identify a specific discovery request to which it claimed the documents it had produced were responsive; in return, the Garcias would then provide Chrysler with a list of contended deficiencies in Chrysler's production efforts. To this point, the tenor of the parties' relationship appears to have been accurately characterized by one of the Garcias' lawyers when he stated to the trial court that "some of our trouble may be more [of a] communication problem as opposed to an actual production problem."

However, discovery proceedings grew contentious in early 1991. On January 4, 1991, the Garcias filed Plaintiffs' Third Motion to Compel Discovery and Motion for Sanctions in which they complained of Chrysler's alleged failure to adequately respond to nineteen requests for production in Plaintiffs' Second Request for Discovery and three interrogatories contained in Plaintiffs' Third Request for Discovery. In its written response, Chrysler alleged that the Garcias had not pointed out gaps in Chrysler's responses as agreed but instead had responded with a Motion for Sanctions. This resulted in Chrysler's accusation that opposing counsel was trying to set up a sanctions "tort." See William Kilgarlin, Sanction for Discovery Abuse: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?, 54 TEX.BAR J. 659 (1991); Charles Herring, The Rise of the "Sanctions Tort", Texas Lawyer, Jan. 28, 1991, at 22-23.

The hearing on Plaintiffs' Third Motion to Compel and Motion for Sanctions was held on February 15, 1991. The Garcias accused Chrysler of failing to comply with the Agreed Order, complaining primarily of Chrysler's failure to produce certain M-body crash tests, ⁴ a crash test index "that we know about that they haven't given us," ⁵ an organizational chart, and information about Chrysler's document retention policies. ⁶ The sanctions requested included the striking of Chrysler's pleadings. The Garcias' counsel argued: "[W]hat is needed is punishment and it needs to be rather harsh, it needs to be harsh enough to get people's attention...." A harsh punishment would be appropriate, claimed the Garcias' counsel, because of Chrysler's lying and bad faith.

In response, Chrysler contended that it had produced everything that it was able to produce. For example, it contended that it had produced "some 100 crash test files" but that others, dating back more than six model years, had been destroyed pursuant to its document retention policy. Chrysler claimed that only if a crash test had been produced in other litigation and maintained in a case file would it be retained, but even then, not in the ordinary course of business.

Following a hearing that lasted approximately eight hours and consumed 196 pages of the record, the trial court signed an Order in which he denied Plaintiffs' Motion for Default Judgment, Plaintiffs' Motion to Strike Chrysler's Pleadings, and Plaintiffs' Motion for Monetary Sanctions. The trial court did, however, order Chrysler to produce by April 1, 1991: (1) the crash test files and results, (2) unedited, computerized records of its entire crash-test index for all M-body type vehicles, and (3) affidavits detailing Chrysler's explanation for all requested documents that it claims were destroyed pursuant to its document retention policy. In the event that Chrysler failed to timely comply with his Order, Judge Dunham conditionally ordered a monetary sanction of $7,500 for each day it failed to do so.

Thereafter, the Garcias served Chrysler with their fourth discovery request. Chrysler's 28-page response raised objections to the request on both general and specific grounds, including the objection that some portions of the fourth request, containing 105 separate items for production, duplicated previous requests.

On March 29, 1991, Chrysler filed a Response to the trial court's Order, asserting that it was in compliance with that Order, and requesting a hearing on April 10, 1991, so that its compliance could be certified to avoid assessment of the $7,500 daily sanction conditionally ordered by Judge Dunham. ⁷ The hearing of April 10th, however, primarily involved Chrysler's objections to the Garcias' fourth request for discovery and spanned two days and 188 pages of the record. The anticipated hearing on Chrysler's Response to the trial court's Order was deferred until April 26, 1991, to be heard with Plaintiffs' Motion for Sanctions.

At the hearing on the Garcias' Motion for Sanctions on April 26, 1991, the primary concerns were crash test reports and Chrysler's electronic crash-test database. Counsel for the Garcias acknowledged that Chrysler did "provide a lot of stuff to us on April 1st" but stated that he had acquired from other sources ⁸ indices that referred to 245 M-body crash tests and that he had only received 191 crash test reports. In response, Chrysler claimed that crash test reports were destroyed pursuant to its document retention policy. But this could not be true, the Garcias' attorney retorted, because "some of the allegedly missing reports had been produced to other plaintiffs in other lawsuits during the same time that we've been trying to get them in this case and, therefore, clearly have not been destroyed."

Chrysler's attorney told Judge Blackmon that two other district judges had "already heard these issues." He pointed out that this lawsuit concerned a frontal impact to an M-body style vehicle--not side and rear-end impacts--and that the previous court ordered production was so limited. He also asserted that the difference between the lists of crash tests produced...