Buckner v. Sam's Club, Inc.

• Decision Date: 25 January 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-2080,95-2080
• Citation: 75 F.3d 290
• Parties: Linda BUCKNER and Lawrence Buckner, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. SAM'S CLUB, INCORPORATED, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 290

75 F.3d 290

Linda BUCKNER and Lawrence Buckner, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. SAM'S CLUB, INCORPORATED, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 95-2080.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued Nov. 1, 1995.

Decided Jan. 25, 1996.

Gerald H. McGlone, McGlone Law Offices, Terre Haute, IN, Thomas Joseph Chowning, argued, Chowning Law Offices, Terre Haute, IN, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Gus Sacopulos, argued, Gregory S. Carter, Sacopulos, Johnson, Carter & Sacopulos, Terre Haute, IN, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and FLAUM and MANION, Circuit Judges.

MANION, Circuit Judge.

Linda Buckner slipped and fell in a Sam's Club while perusing a temporary display of watches and jewelry. As a result of the fall she claimed injuries to her neck, back, and right shoulder. Linda (and her husband) sued in Indiana state court contending that Sam's Club had failed to properly maintain the premises and to take adequate precautions to protect Linda from potential dangers. Sam's Club removed the matter to federal court. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Sam's Club, Inc. We affirm.

Linda Buckner claims to have stepped on a small object that was on the floor near a temporary jewelry and watch display at Sam's Club. She apparently incurred injuries to her back, neck, and shoulder. Lawrence Buckner claims the loss of the comfort, society, and consortium of his wife due to her injuries. From the outset, the principal snag in the Buckners' case has been that the object she stepped on was neither seen nor found. Thus the causal connection between Sam's Club and the fall is tenuous. At her deposition, Linda first described what she stepped on as "something uneven and faulty," and then as a "lump" under "the ball of [her] shoe." She said she did not know what the object was, however, and although an immediate search was made in the enclosed area adjacent to the fall, neither she nor store personnel ever found what (if anything) she had slipped on.

The Buckners attempted to bolster Linda's weak deposition testimony with a supplemental affidavit submitted in response to Sam's Club's motion for summary judgment. There she was decidedly more specific about what she had stepped on, describing it as a "small object" that "felt to be about the size of a ladies watch, which is one of the types of items that were on the display tables." The Buckners also submitted an affidavit from Douglas Timmons, a safety management expert, asserting that Linda had slipped and fallen "as a direct result of stepping on a watch that had been dropped or knocked off the display." The principal basis for this conclusion was his observation that Sam's Club's use of common, light-weight, folding tables without edges or rails made it more likely that merchandise would fall to the floor than if Sam's Club had displayed the items on tables with edges. Also, because the merchandise could easily fall on the floor, Timmons disapproved of the way customers were allowed to handle the watches and jewelry and of Sam's Club's system for monitoring the display area. In short, the affidavit stated that Timmons was sure Linda had slipped on a wayward watch because the nature of the display and the inspection system made it probable that a watch had fallen to the floor.

The district court excluded both affidavits--Linda's on the ground that it was a "clear attempt by plaintiffs to shore up obvious gaps in their prima facie case with phantom evidence" that was contradictory to her sworn deposition testimony; and Timmons' on the ground that it did not contain the type of information that qualifies as expert evidence under the test established in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993). The court also noted that even if admissible, the Timmons affidavit was insufficient to establish causation, the critical missing element of the Buckners' case. The court then ruled that the Buckners had failed to prove their prima facie case and granted Sam's Club's motion for summary judgment. (The district court also discounted the possibility that the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur supplies the missing causation, and the Buckners have expressly disclaimed that theory on appeal.)

On appeal, the Buckners contend that the district court erred in striking the Buckner and Timmons affidavits. The Buckner affidavit did not contradict Linda's prior sworn testimony, they argue, and the Timmons affidavit should have been admitted because it was based on "scientific safety management principles" and was valuable to assist the trier of fact in understanding the nature of Sam's Club's negligence.

We review a district court's rulings on evidentiary matters for abuse of discretion, giving the trial judge much deference. United States v. Akinrinade, 61 F.3d 1279, 1282 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 116 S.Ct. 541, --- L.Ed.2d ---- (1995); Littlefield v. McGuffey, 954 F.2d 1337, 1342 (7th Cir.1992). As a general rule, the law of this circuit does not permit a party to create an issue of fact by submitting an affidavit whose conclusions contradict prior deposition or other sworn testimony. Russell v. Acme-Evans Company, 51 F.3d 64, 67-68 (7th Cir.1995); Diliberti v. United States, 817 F.2d 1259, 1263 (7th Cir.1987); Babrocky v. Jewel Food Co., 773 F.2d 857, 861-62 (7th Cir.1985); cf. Adelman-Tremblay v. Jewel Companies, Inc., 859 F.2d 517, 520-21 (7th Cir.1988) (contradictory affidavit containing newly-discovered evidence is an exception to rule). However, supplemental affidavits can be employed to clarify ambiguous or confusing deposition testimony. Id. at 520.

Sam's Club argues (and the district court concluded) that the Buckner affidavit was a blatant contradiction of Linda's prior deposition testimony. But that probably overstates it. True, in her deposition Linda denied knowing precisely what the object was, but she did offer some commentary on its physical nature, describing it as "uneven and faulty" and "lumpy." The Sam's Club attorney who took her deposition interpreted this to mean that the cause of Linda's fall "was some kind of a foreign object" which was "raised." The statement in the subsequent affidavit that she stepped on a "small object" is not contradictory, therefore, unless one means to argue that she could have stepped on a "large" object, something Linda's testimony and the context of the accident would seem to preclude. Rather, the potential contradiction appears when the affidavit's convenient statement that the object "felt to be about the size of a ladies' watch" is contrasted with the prior response in her deposition that she did not know what the object was. ...