A woman who fell asleep on train tracks in Houston’s Fifth Ward saw her $73 million jury award thrown out Tuesday, after a Texas appeals court ordered a new trial in the case.
The Court of Appeals for the First District of Texas said the trial court applied the wrong legal standard in a 2016 incident in which Mary Johnson was struck by a Union Pacific train at the Lyons Avenue railroad crossing in the early morning hours of March 5. Johnson, per both the initial lawsuit and Tuesday’s ruling, fell asleep on the railroad tracks, trespassing onto Union Pacific property without consent (Johnson, per Tuesday’s appeal, had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.197, more than twice the legal limit).
The original lawsuit claimed Union Pacific engineers “could have stopped the train before striking [Johnson],” who suffered severe brain damage and lost both her limbs in the accident. The suit added that Union Pacific’s train did not illuminate its lights promptly as it approached Johnson, a claim disputed in Tuesday’s ruling by Justice Amparo Guerra…