http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/business/woman-cleared-in-death-caused-by-gms-faulty-ignition-switch.html 2014-11-24 18:41:10 Woman Cleared in Death Caused by G.M.’s Faulty Ignition Switch Ten years after the crash that killed a passenger, a Texas woman’s guilty plea was overturned after it became clear that the switch was to blame. === Ten years since her boyfriend’s death in a defective Candice Anderson was held responsible for the death of Gene Mikale Erickson, 25, when he was killed on Nov. 15, 2004, riding as a front-seat passenger in her beige Ion. Ms. Anderson crashed the car into a tree on a bright afternoon while driving along a country road in Ben Wheeler, Tex. In May, The New York Times On Monday, 10 years and nine days since the accident, a judge in Van Zandt County, Tex., overturned Ms. Anderson’s guilty plea and cleared her record. Ms. Anderson’s parents and Mr. Erickson’s mother were in the courtroom, the same one in which Ms. Anderson had been indicted by a grand jury years earlier. “It’s overwhelming; it’s a range of emotions,” Ms. Anderson said. “I’m elated. Things are upside down. Or, really, right-side up.” The district attorney who prosecuted Ms. Anderson submitted a statement in support of her vindication. That district attorney, Leslie Poynter Dixon, and the police trooper who investigated Ms. Anderson’s accident, whose report strongly suggested that Ms. Anderson’s driving had been influenced by intoxication, had both said that if the ignition-switch defect had been publicly known at the time of the crash, certain details of the accident — like the seemingly inexplicable lack of skid marks or evasive action — would have been seen differently. “At the time, unbeknownst to Ms. Anderson or my office, there were issues regarding her 2004 Saturn Ion,” Ms. Poynter Dixon wrote in a letter in support of Ms. Anderson in July. “Had I known at the time that G.M. knew of these issues and has since admitted to such, I do not believe the grand jury would have indicted her for intoxication manslaughter.” On Monday, General Motors, in a statement, for the first time publicly linked Mr. Erickson’s death to the defect. Ms. Anderson, 21 at the time of the crash, suffered serious injuries, including a lacerated liver. But the guilt surrounding her own survival and her boyfriend’s death, for which she was prosecuted on an intoxicated manslaughter charge, because of the trace amount of Xanax in her system, caused her more enduring pain, she said. Until this year, she wrestled with questions about her role in Mr. Erickson’s death. The police trooper who investigated the accident had deduced that Ms. Anderson was intoxicated before her drug test results came back. His police report referred to the seemingly inexplicable circumstances of the accident, her history of recreational drug use, “witness testimony and Anderson’s behavior at the scene,” which was disoriented and emotional. She pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in October 2007, five months after G.M. had conducted an internal review of the case and quietly ruled its car was to blame. She served five years probation and paid more than $10,000 in fines and restitution. G.M. did not disclose its culpability when federal safety regulators asked about the cause of the crash in a so-called After her story was first reported in the spring, Ms. Anderson’s attorney, Robert Hilliard, and federal lawmakers had called on Mary T. Barra, G.M.'s chief executive, to support a pardon. At a congressional hearing in July, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called Ms. Anderson’s indictment “a perversion of the justice process,” adding that “G.M. allowed an innocent person to be convicted of a crime.” He asked Ms. Barra and Michael P. Millikin, G.M.'s top lawyer, to contact Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to urge a pardon for Ms. Anderson. Both declined; Ms. Barra indicated that she could submit “evidence to support” Ms. Anderson’s exoneration, but she did not think it appropriate to advocate for it. Ms. Anderson said she still had not heard from G.M. directly. “I don’t expect I ever will,” she said. Ms. Anderson said would accept a payment from the automaker’s victim compensation program run by Kenneth R. Feinberg. “My plan is to take the compensation and take this clearing of my record and move on with my life.” On Monday, James R. Cain, a spokesman for G.M., defended the automaker’s long silence on the matter. “We have taken a neutral position on Ms. Anderson’s case,” he said. “It is appropriate for the court to determine the legal status of Ms. Anderson.” He noted that Mr. Feinberg’s compensation program “is set up to evaluate claims without consideration of contributory negligence.” Having long worked as a home health aide and currently in pursuit of a nursing degree, Ms. Anderson said he had suffered professionally from being a convicted criminal. To be accepted to nursing school, she had to petition the Texas Board of Nursing and pay for a psychiatric examination to prove her mental stability. With her criminal record, she would have been barred from at-home caregiving and hospice work, and she had been worried about finding full-time work after graduation. “Who wants someone taking care of their mother if they have homicide on their record?” she said. Beyond its practical effects on her work, Ms. Anderson said her cleared record would significantly affect her life in other ways. “This will change so many things,” she said, noting that she would someday be grateful to tell the story of her exoneration to her daughters, now 4 and 6. “My heart is going to be a lot lighter to be able to tell them ‘this is what happened, this horrible thing. And it wasn’t Mommy’s fault.'”