Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is asking a federal appeals court to wipe out the $243 million verdict a Miami jury handed Tesla over a fatal Autopilot crash.
The attorneys general of Alabama and Georgia joined the July 9 brief, which asks the 11th Circuit to throw out the judgment entirely — or, failing that, cut the $200 million punitive award down to three times compensatory damages.
What the states are asking for
The brief’s conclusion leaves no ambiguity about what Florida wants: “The Court should reverse and direct entry of judgment for Tesla or vacate and remand for a new trial. But should the Court affirm the district court on liability, the Court should reverse the district court’s grant of punitive damages or, at minimum, reduce the punitive damages to three times the net compensatory damages.”
The states’ core argument is that excessive punitive damages deter innovation that benefits society, and that the trial court failed to apply Florida’s statutory 3:1 cap on punitive damages.
The verdict they’re targeting came in August 2025, when a Miami federal jury found Tesla 33% liable in the fatal Autopilot crash — roughly $43 million of about $129 million in compensatory damages, plus $200 million in punitive damages assessed against Tesla alone.
The crash happened on April 25, 2019, in Key Largo. George McGee was driving a 2019 Model S with Autopilot engaged when he dropped his phone and bent down to retrieve it. The car ran a stop sign and a flashing red light at roughly 62 mph and struck a parked Chevrolet Tahoe. Naibel Benavides Leon, 22, was killed. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, was severely injured.
U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom upheld the judgment on February 20, ruling that the trial evidence “more than supported” what the jury found and that Tesla had raised no new arguments. Tesla appealed to the 11th Circuit, where the case is now docketed as No. 26-10858.
It’s worth remembering how Tesla conducted itself in this case. In October 2025, the trial judge sanctioned Tesla for “willful” and “deliberate” violations after an independent researcher recovered crash data that Tesla had told the plaintiffs did not exist.
The donation question
State attorneys general file amicus briefs on punitive damages routinely, and the presence of Alabama and Georgia gives this one the shape of an ordinary multi-state filing.
But it lands in an uncomfortable context for Uthmeier.
A Tampa Bay Times investigation published July 7 documented three separate cases in which Uthmeier’s fundraising committee took $25,000 donations from people or companies involved in civil litigation — and his office then intervened on their behalf, in two cases by writing amicus briefs. The donations preceded the interventions by days or weeks.
Roughly three weeks before the Tesla brief was filed, Uthmeier’s committee accepted $25,000 from a political committee tied to the Southern Group, one of the lobbying firms representing Tesla in Tallahassee. State disclosure records show the firm recently began lobbying for Tesla specifically on liability for advanced driver-assistance systems.
That timing was first reported by investigative journalist Jason Garcia at Seeking Rents, who was careful to note the limits of what it proves: the Southern Group has a long client list, and there’s no way to establish the donation was tied to Tesla.
Uthmeier was never elected to the job. He was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — his former boss, having served as DeSantis’s chief of staff — after Ashley Moody was given the Senate seat Marco Rubio vacated. He’s now running for a full term and has raised more than $10 million.
DeSantis is a known political ally of Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, and one of the largest Republican political donors.
The legislative backup plan
Even if the 11th Circuit leaves the verdict intact, Tesla has a second front open in Tallahassee.
Florida Senate Bill 1616, filed by Sen. Tom Leek (R-Ormond Beach), would have created a new statute limiting the liability of advanced driving system manufacturers and authorizing punitive damages only in narrow circumstances. It incorporated arguments that overlap with what Uthmeier’s office just told the 11th Circuit.
The bill died in the Judiciary Committee on March 13. But Leek is tentatively in line to become Senate president after the 2030 elections, and the measure can be refiled next session.
Electrek’s Take
We’ve been tracking Tesla’s legal exposure as it compounds — the company is now facing up to $14.5 billion in lawsuits, and NHTSA has escalated its visibility probe to an engineering analysis covering 3.2 million vehicles, one step from a forced FSD recall.
What makes the Benavides verdict matter isn’t the dollar figure. It’s that a jury got to see internal Tesla evidence, weigh how the company marketed Autopilot against what the system actually did, and assign punitive damages for it. That is the mechanism by which a company that has spent a decade overselling its driver-assistance systems finally faces a cost for it.
Capping punitives at 3x compensatory would substantially defang that mechanism. So would SB 1616. The “excessive damages deter innovation” argument has a real academic pedigree, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise — but applying it here, to a company a judge sanctioned for withholding crash data, is a strange hill to pick.
The donation timing is suggestive and nothing more. Garcia said so himself, and we agree. The stronger story is the pattern: an appointed attorney general with a documented habit of putting the state’s lawyers behind donors’ civil disputes, now doing it for the most politically connected carmaker in the country. Musk spent at least $10 million backing DeSantis’s 2024 presidential run — a campaign Uthmeier managed for a stretch. Nobody in this arrangement is a stranger to anyone else.
Whether the 11th Circuit cares is a separate question. Appeals courts are not especially moved by amicus briefs, and Tesla’s own filings are doing the heavy lifting here. But if the punitive award survives, expect SB 1616 to be back.
The facts are: everyone agrees that the driver bears most of the responsibility, but the driver believed that Autopilot would prevent the fatal crash, and therefore thought he could be on his phone. He thought that because of Tesla’s own marketing and communications around Autopilot. In the court case, Tesla lied and misled the plaintiffs and the authorities to avoid sharing critical crash data. After being found 33% responsible, Tesla filed and lost an appeal with literally no new argument.
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