HARRISBURG – A recent unanimous ruling from a panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania may have great import for future product liability trials statewide, as it stated that trial courts may prevent defendants from using evidence pertaining to industry standards.
The 44-page ruling from the Superior Court’s panel of Victor P. Stabile, Megan McCarthy King and Dan Pellegrini issued on April 15 not only upheld a trial court jury verdict of $2.5 million in the case of Sullivan Et.Al v. Werner Company and Lowe’s Companies, Inc. Et.Al, but also established precedent with respect to evidentiary limits in product liability actions.
Pellegrini authored the Court’s opinion.
The Superior Court’s decision to allow defendants to be barred from using evidence on a given device’s industry standards, constitutes the first opinion evincing such a viewpoint since the landmark Tincher v. Omega Flex decision, reached in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
Plaintiff Michael Sullivan alleged that Werner Company’s Baker-model scaffolds were designed defectively, arguing workers could be rotate off the scaffold’s deck pins, which would later lead the platform to collapse.
Sullivan and his wife Melissa initially filed suit against both Werner and Lowe’s, after Michael used the Baker scaffold on the job while working at Albert Schweitzer Elementary School in Levittown in June 2014.
At that time, the deck pins on the scaffold Sullivan used came loose, which then caused the platform to fall out from under him. In the incident, Sullivan broke his tailbone and suffered a litany of other injuries. Sullivan claimed he has continuing back pain, which requires ongoing care and physical therapy, in addition to treatment for multiple hernias.
Even though the scaffold met safety guidelines from both the American National Standards Institute and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Sullivan’s counsel filed a motion in limine to prevent the company defendants from bringing evidence at trial pertaining to those guidelines, saying that the Tincher decision did not prevent barring such evidence in Pennsylvania product liability actions.
A Philadelphia court judge and jury concurred, with the latter awarding Sullivan $2.5 million for his injuries. The defendants then appealed to the Superior Court.
Pellegrini, in writing for the Superior Court, explained the Tincher decision made clear that Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts was the “touchstone” for such product liability cases statewide, where strict liability is established regardless of whether a manufacturer “exercised all possible care in the preparation and sale of their product.”
“Whether a manufacturer has complied with industry or government standards goes to whether it ‘exercised all possible care in preparation of product’ in making the design choice, not on whether there was a design defect in the product itself,” Pellegrini said.
“Under the above-quoted provision of the Restatement (Second), it is irrelevant if a product is designed with all possible care, including whether it has complied with all industry and governmental standards, because the manufacturer is still liable if the product is unsafe.”
This ruling contradicts a key argument of defense attorneys surrounding Tincher, where they feel that evidence connected to industry design standards should be permitted for use in crafting a defense for their company clients.
The Superior Court felt differently, again pointing to Section 402A in declaring that a company defendant should have “knowledge of a product’s danger…no matter how foreseeable the defect was or how reasonable its conduct in the design and manufacture.”
“If imputation of knowledge of the danger to the manufacturer is eliminated by the standard as to whether the manufacturer could have reasonably foreseen the risks of the product, which has the same effect as eliminating liability without negligence on the part of the manufacturer. In other words, strict liability would be eliminated, something that Tincher did not do,” Pellegrini said.
Pellegrini further explained that precedent existed in forbidding industry standard evidence from being admissible in product liability trials, referring to both the Lewis v. Coffing Hoist Division Et.Al and Gaudio v. Ford Motor Co. cases, from the state Supreme Court and Superior Court, respectively.
Superior Court of Pennsylvania case 3086 EDA 2019
Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas case 161003086
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com