Leonard Goldstein, a retired Orange County Superior Court judge who presided over the 1970s Ford Pinto product liability case that resulted in a then-record jury award of nearly $128.5 million in damages, and who later oversaw civil cases related to the UCI Medical Center fertility clinic scandal, has died. He was 76.
Goldstein, who had congestive heart failure, died April 12 at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, said his daughter Bethany Anderson.
A UC Berkeley law school graduate, he was appointed in 1976 to the Municipal Court bench in north Orange County by Gov. Jerry Brown, who elevated him to the Superior Court in 1977.
After Goldstein lost his position in a judicial election in 1978 -- a time in which prosecutors throughout California led a call to unseat a number of incumbent judges who had been appointed by Brown -- the governor put Goldstein back on the Municipal Court bench in Fullerton early the next year and in 1980 elevated him again to the Orange County Superior Court.
In a 1987 profile of Goldstein in The Times, Superior Court Judge Robert H. Green said the election defeat "was really shattering to [Goldstein] because it was absolutely unjustified."
"The governor told me at a dinner once that Goldstein was one of the best [judicial] appointments he ever made," said Green, who was co-counsel with Goldstein on numerous cases in the early 1960s when they were lawyers in Santa Ana. "He has the best legal mind of anyone I ever worked with."
Goldstein, who served as presiding judge of the Orange County Superior Court in 1990 and '91, retired from the court in 1996.
A month after Brown appointed him to the Superior Court in 1977, Goldstein began presiding over a six-month trial that made national headlines: the Pinto case.
The jury awarded Richard Grimshaw of Anaheim $2.8 million in compensatory damages and $125 million in punitive damages stemming from a 1972 automobile accident in which a Pinto erupted in flames when it was rear-ended by another car on Interstate 15 near San Bernardino.
The driver of the Pinto, Lily Gray, 52, of Orange, suffered fatal burns, and passenger Grimshaw, then 13, was severely burned over 90% of his body.
The case, according to a 1978 account in The Times, was based on allegations that Ford had deliberately fitted Pintos with poorly designed gas tanks that ruptured upon even light impact.
