Klein v. Stahl GMBH & Co., SUCCESSOR-IN-INTEREST

• Citation: 185 F.3d 98
• Decision Date: 15 July 1999
• Docket Number: SUCCESSOR-IN-INTEREST
• Parties: (3rd Cir. 1999) JANET MARTIN KLEIN, Appellant v. STAHL GMBH & CO., MASCHINEFABRIK AND HEIDELBERG USA,TO HEIDELBERG EASTERN, INC., Appellees NO. 98-3185
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit)

Page 98

185 F.3d 98 (3rd Cir. 1999)

JANET MARTIN KLEIN, Appellant v. STAHL GMBH & CO., MASCHINEFABRIK AND HEIDELBERG USA, SUCCESSOR-IN-INTEREST TO HEIDELBERG EASTERN, INC., Appellees

NO. 98-3185

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT

Argued March 22, 1999

Decided July 15, 1999

On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania D.C. No. 95-448 Magistrate Judge: Honorable Kenneth J. Benson

[Copyrighted Material Omitted]

Timothy D. Appelbe (argued), The Bank Tower, Suite 1208, 307 Fourth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Michael J. Bruzzese, The Bank Tower, Suite 1201, 307 Fourth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222, Attorneys for Appellants

Mark C. Schultz (argued), Cozen & O'Connor, 200 Four Falls Corporate Center, Suite 400, West Conshohocken, PA 19428

Charles Kirshner, Margolis Edelstein, 1500 Grant Building, Pittsburgh PA 15219, Attorneys for Appellees

Before: GREENBERG and ROTH, Circuit Judges and POLLAK, District Judge^*

OPINION OF THE COURT

POLLAK, District Judge

This products liability case was commenced in a Pennsylvania state court and was then removed, on grounds of diversity, to the District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. After discovery had begun under the supervision of a Magistrate Judge, the parties agreed to have the Magistrate Judge take full charge of the case with responsibility for its disposition. Thereafter, the Magistrate Judge granted summary judgment in favor of defendants. From that judgment plaintiff has appealed.

In granting summary judgment, the Magistrate Judge concluded that a party who has asserted conflicting factual positions in two different affidavits has done so in bad faith and should be barred by judicial estoppel from adopting the second position, even where the parties and the Magistrate Judge recognize that the second position is more likely truer to the underlying facts. We find that the Magistrate Judge abused his discretion by (1) invoking judicial estoppel without considering the sufficiency of less extreme sanctions that he might have found available under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or federal statutes, or under the court's inherent power, and (2) determining that the fact that a party has espoused two inconsistent positions is, without more, conclusively demonstrative of bad faith. We will therefore vacate the judgment entered by the Magistrate Judge and remand for further proceedings.

I. Facts

Plaintiff Janet Klein worked for a Pittsburgh printer, where she operated a commercial printing machine known as a "buckle folder," which folded paper and trimmed it as it flowed out of the machine. The parties agree that, at least if improperly used, several parts of the buckle folder are capable of causing injury. There is an "upper slitter," which is a rotating shaft equipped with cutting knives, located above the level of the output table, and there is a "lower slitter" of somewhat different construction below the table. The two are not far apart.

Though the folded paper flowed onto a "delivery table," the machine did not include a depository for the trimmed paper scraps. Klein and her co-workers generally placed cardboard boxes on the floor below the place from which the paper flowed. The paper scraps fell into the boxes in what the plaintiff describes as a "pillar-like effect," and when the pillar of paper scraps built up to the part of the machine in which the rotating shafts and knife blades were located, Klein would pat the pillar down. On February 22, 1992, when Klein was reaching to pat a pillar down, her hand made contact with part of the machine and was seriously injured.

II. Procedural History

Klein sued the machine's manufacturer (Stahl GMBH & Co. Maschinefabrik) and its American distributor (Heidelberg USA) in state court, alleging that she had "attempted to clear scrap paper that had accumulated underneath the machine when her right hand became trapped in the unguarded and unprotected folding rollers." Complaint P4. The defendants removed the case to federal court on diversity grounds, and the District Judge to whom the matter was assigned referred the case to a Magistrate Judge for the conduct of the pretrial phases of the litigation.

The defendants filed a motion for summary judgment on June 17, 1996 ("first summary judgment motion"), asserting that the machine had been built and distributed with "a barrier guard protecting the nip point between the slitter shaft and the shaft below it." A104. Klein responded to the motion by arguing that there had never been a barrier guard on the machine during her year and a half on the job. She argued in the alternative that if there ever had been a guard, "it interfered with the efficient operation of the machine and it was never identified as a guard or other type of safety device." Pl. Br. at 6.

Klein's last contention in her response to the first summary judgment motion set the direction for much of the pre-trial practice that followed, and forms an important ingredient of the subject of this appeal. Klein argued that a barrier guard -- even if one had been present on the machine and did not interfere with its operation-- would not have prevented her injury "because she was injured on the upper slitter shaft, not at the location of the lower slitter shaft and drive shaft where the guard was designed to be installed." Id. In support of this last statement, Klein attached an affidavit dated July 10, 1996 in which she swore that "[e]ven if the [barrier guard] had been in place before my accident it would not have prevented my accident because my hand made contact with the upper slitter shaft located above the area where the [barrier guard] is located . . . ." A149-50 (hereinafter the "first affidavit").

Surprised by Klein's contention that she had been injured through contact with the upper slitter shaft-- not the lower slitter shaft, where they had presumed the injury had occurred -- the defendants, by letter, informed the Magistrate Judge that there was some likelihood that Klein's response had rendered the summary judgment motion moot and requested twenty days in which to "investigate whether [they] wish[ed] to file a reply brief or take some other action." A151. The Magistrate Judge granted the request. A153. The defendants subsequently decided not to file any further response to the summary judgment motion. On November 15, 1996, the Magistrate Judge ruled on the defendants' first motion for summary judgment:

. . . counsel for defendants having sent the court a letter . . . asserting that the facts presented in the response to the motion may result in the motion being rendered moot . . . [and] it appearing to the court that defendants' motion for summary judgment has been rendered moot by these developments;

IT IS ORDERED that the defendants' motion for summary judgment (Docket #17) is withdrawn as MOOT.

A176-77. The order made no mention of Klein's first two arguments -- that there had been no barrier guard affixed to the machine during the period that she operated the machine, and, alternatively, that if there was a guard or other safety device auxiliary to the machine it had not functioned properly and had not been properly labeled.

On January 27, 1997, the District Court, acting pursuant to the parties' agreement, assigned the case to the Magistrate Judge for disposition. Three days later, the defendants submitted three motions in limine, one of which sought "to preclude evidence of subsequent accidents/ incidents occurring on the same machine." A194-204. In particular, the defendants sought to preclude evidence of an accident suffered subsequent to Klein's accident by Carol Lamothe -- one of Klein's former co-workers-- on the same machine.¹ The motion relied chiefly on the following short excerpt from deposition testimony that Lamothe had given in a case that she had also brought against Stahl and Heidelberg:

Q. If I asked you to point on one of these photographs to the place where your hand got caught, could you do that or no?

A. No, I could not.

A195; see also A208. Defendants argued that the deposition testimony showed "that there is no evidence that Ms. Lamothe caught her hand in the same location where the plaintiff in the case at bar alleges that she caught her hand." A195. Because Lamothe did not know precisely where her hand was caught, and Klein had averred in her first affidavit that her "hand made contact with the upper slitter shaft," A150, defendants contended that evidence of the Lamothe accident was not probative, or at least was more prejudicial than probative. A196.

The Magistrate Judge granted the motion and precluded the evidence. A218. Relying on Barker v. Deere & Co., 60 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 1995) -- which holds that a "district court must be apprised of the specific facts of previous accidents in order to make a reasoned determination as to whether the prior accidents are `substantially similar' " and thus admissible in evidence -- the Magistrate Judge reasoned as follows:

[Lamothe stated] that she cannot point to the place on the machine where her hand got caught. Plaintiff has described with some specificity where her hand got caught in the machine. She states that she was patting down paper which had accumulated in a box adjacent to the machine, and that her hand got caught in the "upper slitter shaft." Plaintiff has presented several pages from Ms. Lamothe's deposition in which she states that she was patting down scrap paper, and that her hand got caught in the machine, but that she is not sure where it got caught. On the evidence presented, it is not clear that the accidents occurred in "substantially similar" circumstances . . . .

A216 (citations to record omitted).

Klein subsequently learned through discovery that several other accidents had occurred on the same machine. The defendants, apparently aware that Klein had learned this information, filed a new motion in limine on ...