The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [148]
“I defy Mr. Neal,” he declared, “to stop that Pinto!” His words became a rally cry, challenging Neal to establish that a Ford Pinto containing three teenage girls had come to a halt on an Indiana highway before being struck from behind by a Chevy van.
It was yet another moment of high drama in a ground-breaking criminal trial that had captivated the nation. In the first case of its kind in U.S. history, prosecutors blamed the girls’ deaths on the car’s manufacturer, charging Ford Motor Company with reckless homicide for allegedly designing a vehicle that was prone to explode in low- to moderate-speed rear crashes.
If the Pinto had been safe, the prosecutors contended, the three teenagers would have walked away virtually unscathed from the relatively minor collision. But, they said, because the car’s gas tank had been located in a vulnerable position, the car erupted in a fireball that consumed them all.
A pivotal issue was the severity of the crash. Neal maintained that the Pinto had been stopped on the highway and the van was traveling at fifty miles an hour. “No subcompact could have withstood the assault of the van in this case,” Neal told the jurors.
The prosecutor, however, countered that the Pinto had been moving in the same direction as the van, which meant the force of the impact would have been much less. Indeed, a few eyewitnesses testified the car had been in motion, though their accounts varied and during cross-examination Neal sought to raise doubts about the vantage points from which they saw the Pinto.
Then the prosecutor presented his star witness: the shaggy-haired, twenty-one-year-old driver of the van, who had not been criminally charged for the crash and was cooperating with the prosecution. He testified that the Pinto had been moving at fifteen to twenty miles an hour when they collided. Neal scoffed, pointing out that the distracted driver had only seen the Pinto for one-sixth of a second before hitting it. But the driver, who had five previous traffic convictions in three years, stuck to his story.
In the glare of the television cameras, the prosecutor was ebullient. Feeling confident in the thoroughness of his investigation and believing Neal could offer no contradictory testimony, he defiantly challenged Neal to make good on his promise that he would stop the Pinto.
Surprisingly, however, the prosecutor’s bravado was short-lived. A few days later, to the astonishment of the prosecution, Neal used both negative and positive evidence to accomplish what the prosecutor was convinced he could never do.
First, Neal undermined the testimony of the van’s driver. The physician who had treated him for minor injuries said the driver had admitted to him that the Pinto had been stopped. That was damaging enough for the prosecution.
Even more devastating, Neal then presented two surprise witnesses that police had somehow overlooked during their supposedly exhaustive investigation. Both were hospital workers who testified that the driver of the Pinto told them independently before her death that she had been stopped on U.S. Highway 133 when the van struck her car.
The prosecutor was stunned. In a flash, these two unforeseen witnesses changed the entire momentum of the trial. “Nobody knew anything about them,” the prosecutor sputtered. “They came out of the blue.”
Outside the courtroom, Neal was ecstatic. “The prosecutor challenged us to stop that Pinto,” he said, stifling a chuckle. “Well, now we’ve stopped it twice.”
The once-confident prosecutor, now publicly embarrassed, found himself on the defensive as reporters pelted him with questions about why his investigation had failed to unearth these witnesses. Ultimately, after several judicial rulings further eroded the prosecutor’s case, jurors voted to acquit the automaker.
Neal’s performance, which I documented in my book Reckless Homicide, was among the most masterful I had ever seen in my years as a legal affairs journalist. 3 His success was not