Cynics are questioning the motives of a Florida man who, after a jury awarded nearly $7.6 million in compensatory damages against the car wash responsible for his wife's death, dropped his claim for punitive damages.

McNeil "Mac" Brown lost his wife in a freak accident at the Town 'N Country Car Wash of Tampa in May 2005. An employee who was working inside an SUV lost control of the vehicle and struck Brenda Brown, 43, as she was pushing the couple's 18-month-old son in a stroller back to her clean car.

At the start of the trial, the defense admitted liability, leaving the Hillsborough County Circuit Court jury to consider only damages. After the jury awarded the compensatory damages Jan. 26, plaintiff's attorney Steve Yerrid announced to the courtroom:

The jury has spoken and justice has been done. Mr. Brown believes forgiveness is a virtue ... He believes enough pain has been inflicted.

One juror told The Tampa Tribune that Brown could have won a punitives award in the “tens of millions of dollars.” Yerrid had argued that the car wash's owners were grossly negligent for allowing the employee cleaning the SUV to drive on their property without a license.

Denzil Blake told investigators he accidentally put the gear shift into drive and then hit the gas instead of the brake. A graphic surveillance tape shows the Isuzu Rodeo rolling out of a bay before barreling into Brenda Brown.

"We had the sword out," Yerrid said. "We just chose not to use it."

Forgiveness, of course, is not a quality normally associated with the plaintiff's bar. And some commentators simply aren't buying that it had much to with the Brown case.

“If you ever want to see a trial lawyer manipulate the press, and the press unskeptically eat it up, you could do worse than to watch the recent performance of Steve Yerrid,” Ted Frank wrote on the Overlawyered blog.

A little more charitably, PrawfsBlawg said that if the facts were really not reprehensible enough to support an award of punitives, “Mac Brown's forgiveness might have been prudent as well as benignly-motivated.”

But Thomas Lyons, who owned the car wash with his wife, doesn't doubt the purity of Brown's motives. "I think it just shows the class of the man we're dealing with here," he told reporters.

It's also worth noting that tort system critics have been gunning for Yerrid since he won $116 million last year on behalf of a client suing two Tampa-area medical practices. It is believed to be the largest medical malpractice award in Florida history.