CVN screenshot of defense attorney Tom Klein delivering his closing argument
Las Vegas, NV - A Nevada state court jury has returned a defense verdict in a product liability trial over allegations an airbag in a Nissan vehicle accidentally deployed and paralyzed the driver, and the full trial was recorded gavel-to-gavel by Courtroom View Network.
The Clark County jury reached their verdict on July 11 in a trial that kicked off on May 28. Plaintiff John Paxin sued Nissan following a 2017 accident, when he drove his 2012 Titan truck off the road. While the vehicle remained upright, the side curtain airbag meant to protect passengers in rollovers - known as a SCAB - inflated and supposedly fractured Paxin’s neck.
Paxin was rendered a quadriplegic and died in 2020 of pneumonia. Attorneys for his family sought $42 million in damages, however Nissan successfully argued Paxin suffered from a medical condition that made his neck brittle and especially prone to injury, and that the SCAB system’s software designed to predict rollovers before they occur functioned properly.
Gavel-to-gavel video of the full trial, including all expert witness testimony and digital images of the public exhibits and demonstratives shown in the courtroom are available with a CVN video library subscription, along with hundreds of other trials from across the country featuring numerous automotive product liability cases.
Attorneys for Nissan relayed a company statement after the trial saying they are pleased by the verdict.
"Nissan is pleased that the jury understood the complex technical arguments in this case and concluded that the 2012 Nissan Titan in question was safely designed," the company stated. "In cases such as this there is significant tragedy to the family involved and Nissan reiterates the sympathy it extended to the family before the trial started."
Attorney J. Randall Jones of Kemp Jones LLP, who represented the plaintiffs, told CVN his team is disappointed by the verdict and “reviewing the issues with our client to decide where we go from here.”
During the trial attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that Nissan allegedly knew for years the truck’s onboard computer could improperly register rollover events. They accused the company of initiating a “service campaign” to repair the problem instead of a formal recall, because they are less expensive and don’t pose a risk of having to halt vehicle sales.
They argued federal regulators had hundreds of reports of rollover detectors in Nissan vehicles giving false positive results, that despite the rough terrain Paxin drove over the incident should not have set off the airbag, and that the deployment was exclusively the result of a design defect.
Nissan’s team, led by attorney Tom Klein of Klein Thomas Lee & Fresard, argued the side curtain airbag in Paxin’s truck functioned properly, and that the system works by calculating when a rollover is likely to occur as opposed to deploying the airbag after a rollover takes place. While Paxin's truck didn't actually roll over, Nissan's attorneys argued that his driving off the embankment met the conditions for the system to think a rollover was imminent.
The defense team explained to jurors that Paxin likely broke his neck - already especially susceptible to injury - in the impact from driving off the road and before the airbag even deployed.
The trial isn’t the first time CVN has covered Klein successfully defending Nissan in a Las Vegas courtroom, or prevailing at a trial involving a side curtain airbag.
In 2023 a California state court jury returned a $21 million verdict in a lawsuit claiming a supposedly defective airbag in a 2011 Altima caused a passenger’s serious brain injury, but assigned all liability to the drunk driver who hit the plaintiffs while clearing Nissan on design defect claims.
In 2022 Klein also successfully defended Nissan in the same court the current trial is taking place in a case centering on a fatal rollover accident involving a 2004-model Nissan Xterra.
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The trial took place before Judge Mark Denton.
The case is captioned John Paxin Jr., et al., v. Nissan North America, et al. A-19-805016-C in Nevada’s Eighth Judicial District Court.
E-mail David Siegel at dsiegel@cvn.com
