Fairley v. American Hoist & Derrick Co., 79-4083
| Citation | 640 F.2d 679 |
| Decision Date | 25 March 1981 |
| Docket Number | No. 79-4083,79-4083 |
| Parties | Paul D. FAIRLEY, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. AMERICAN HOIST & DERRICK COMPANY, etc., Defendant-Appellant. . Unit A |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (5th Circuit) |
Butler, Snow, O'Mara, Stevens & Cannada, Walter G. Watkins, Jr., Roger C. Landrum, Jackson, Miss., for defendant-appellant.
Cumbest & Cumbest, John L. Hunter and Arvis V. Cumbest, Pascagoula, Miss., for plaintiff-appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Before WISDOM, COLEMAN and RANDALL, Circuit Judges.
This is a nettlesome case. It turns on the validity of a jury verdict, now challenged on the ground that it lacks evidentiary support.
The American Hoist & Derrick Company manufactured an American 999-C crawler crane in 1971. It sold the crane to May Machinery that same year. On the same day that May bought the crane it sold it to Gulf Cities Construction Company. Gulf Cities used the crane for several years and then leased it to Baggett Construction on March 3, 1976.
On August 12, 1976, Paul Fairley, an employee of Baggett Construction Company, was working is one of a crew building a gantry at the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. By means of a bucket (hereafter called the "cage") attached to the 999-C crane Fairley had been hoisted to a height of 100 feet in the air, where he was performing the work assigned to him.
Reciting what thereafter happened, in the light most favorable to the verdict, Fairley and three others climbed into the cage and the crane operator, J. D. DeLaughter, began lowering them to the ground, ostensibly for the purpose of eating lunch or taking a noon-day break. The cage did not descend as slowly as had previously been its wont. Instead, it began a dangerously fast descent. It fell approximately 50 feet and then stopped abruptly, before reaching the ground. This precipitate stop of the abnormally rapid descent threw Fairley to the bottom of the cage, from which he sustained severe injuries.
Fairley, of course, was covered by workmen's compensation benefits as an employee of Baggett. Prior to trial, he made a compromise agreement with Gulf Cities Construction and its agents, eliminating all defendants from the suit except American Hoist & Derrick Company, the appellant here.
The indispensable gravamen of Fairley's surviving products liability suit against American Hoist & Derrick, which had manufactured the crane more than five years previously, was that the 999-C crane had been manufactured and sold with a defect which caused the cage to abruptly fall free of restraint and then abruptly stop when the crane brakes caught. Fairley referred to this as "free fall and grab".
The trial jury found for Fairley on strict liability in tort and awarded him $50,000 in damages.
This being a diversity case, liability is governed by the substantive law of the State of Mississippi.
On the other hand, the sufficiency or the insufficiency of the evidence in relation to the verdict is indisputably governed by a federal standard. The standard in this Circuit applied without challenge for more than ten years was announced in Boeing Company v. Shipman, 411 F.2d 365 (5 Cir., 1969) (en banc). A court may not substitute its findings for those of the jury unless the facts and inferences point so strongly and so overwhelmingly in favor of one party that reasonable men could not arrive at a verdict to the contrary. If there is evidence of such quality and weight that reasonable and fair-minded men in the exercise of impartial judgment might reach different conclusions, the jury function may not be invaded.
Under Mississippi law, the lapse of time between manufacture and...
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