Barry v. Quality Steel Products, Inc.

• Decision Date: 06 May 2003
• Docket Number: (SC 16700)
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court
• Parties: NEIL BARRY ET AL. v. QUALITY STEEL PRODUCTS, INC., ET AL. BERNARD COHADE ET AL. v. QUALITY STEEL PRODUCTS, INC., ET AL.

263 Conn. 424

820 A.2d 258

NEIL BARRY ET AL. v. QUALITY STEEL PRODUCTS, INC., ET AL.

BERNARD COHADE ET AL. v. QUALITY STEEL PRODUCTS, INC., ET AL.

(SC 16700)

Supreme Court of Connecticut

Argued September 11, 2002.

Officially released May 6, 2003.

Sullivan, C. J., and Borden, Norcott, Palmer and Zarella, Js. Joel T. Faxon and David Beekman, pro hac vice, with whom was Andrew J. Maloney III, pro hac vice, for the appellants (plaintiffs).

Philip T. Newbury, Jr., for the appellees (defendants).

Andrew J. O'Keefe, with whom were Joseph M. Busher, Jr., and, on the brief, Denise Martino Phelan, for the appellee (intervening plaintiff).

Opinion

NORCOTT, J.

The dispositive issue in this appeal involves the viability of the doctrine of superseding cause. The plaintiffs, Neil Barry, Diana Barry, Bernard Cohade and Lynn Cohade,¹ appeal² from the judgment of the trial court in favor of the named defendant, Quality Steel Products, Inc. (Quality Steel), and the defendant Ring's End, Inc. (Ring's End). On appeal, the plaintiffs claim that the trial court improperly instructed the jury on the doctrine of superseding cause because: (1) the alleged negligence of the plaintiffs' employer, DeLuca Construction Company (DeLuca), was not outside the scope of the original risk posed by the defendants' defective product; and (2) any negligence by DeLuca was not the sole proximate cause of the plaintiffs' injuries. The defendants claim that the trial court properly instructed the jury on the doctrine of superseding cause because the jury could consider the combined negligence of the plaintiffs, their coworker and DeLuca as a superseding cause of the plaintiffs' accident. Additionally, the defendants contend that, if we order a new trial, we should consider whether the trial court improperly: (1) excluded evidence of the absence of prior accidents involving the same product; (2) excluded certain expert testimony; (3) denied the defendants' motion to bifurcate the liability and damages portions of the trial; and (4) granted summary judgment in favor of DeLuca, which had intervened as a plaintiff in the action.³ As we explain herein, we conclude that the doctrine of superseding cause, as applied in the present case, no longer plays a useful role in our common law of proximate cause. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the trial court in favor of the defendants and order a new trial.

The plaintiffs brought this product liability action⁴ pursuant to General Statutes § 52-572m et seq.⁵ against Quality Steel alleging that it had designed and manufactured a defective product, namely, roof brackets, which were utilized by the plaintiffs in the hanging of shingles, and against Ring's End, the seller of the brackets.⁶ Thereafter, the plaintiffs filed a motion in limine asking the trial court to exclude evidence of any alleged negligence on the part of DeLuca, and to deny the defendants' request to charge the jury on the doctrine of superseding cause. The court denied the motion and, at the end of the testimony, the trial court instructed the jury on the doctrine of superseding cause.⁷ After answering a set of special interrogatories,⁸ the jury returned a verdict in favor of the defendants on all counts. The trial court denied the plaintiffs' motion to set aside the verdict and rendered judgment for the defendants. This appeal followed.

The jury reasonably could have found the following facts. The plaintiffs were employed as carpenters by DeLuca. On February 26, 1998, the plaintiffs were putting shingles on the roof of the New Canaan Nature Center when the platform staging on which they were working collapsed, causing the plaintiffs to fall to the ground and sustain severe injuries. Immediately prior to the collapse, the plaintiffs were working on a wooden plank attached to the roof by roof brackets designed and manufactured by Quality Steel and purchased from Ring's End.

The roof brackets were used as part of a structure that created a platform on which the plaintiffs could work. To install the brackets, the plaintiffs nailed them to the roof through three slots on the bracket. After the brackets were attached to the roof, a plank was placed on top of the brackets, which then provided a surface on which the plaintiffs could stand in order to shingle the roof. Although there had been additional pipe scaffolding located around the perimeter of the roof prior to the time the plaintiffs fell, it was taken down before the plaintiffs' accident.

After working on the planks for several hours in the morning, the plaintiffs returned to the planking after lunch and began shingling the roof on the right side of the building. Shortly after the plaintiffs returned to work on the roof, the planking suddenly fell out from under them and they fell to the ground. Almost immediately after the plaintiffs fell, Gene Marini, the general superintendent at DeLuca, discovered one of the roof brackets used by the plaintiffs in a distorted condition on the ground near where they fell.⁹

Quality Steel's instruction label on the roof brackets suggests that the user attach the brackets to the roof using sixteenpenny nails.¹⁰ The defendants introduced evidence that some of the brackets were installed by another DeLuca employee, Nate Manizza, using eightpenny nails. The plaintiffs both testified that when they installed roof brackets they used larger, twelvepenny nails. Neither the plaintiffs nor Manizza could remember if they had installed the specific brackets that had collapsed causing the plaintiffs to fall. Cohade testified, however, that he saw Manizza installing the brackets in the general area where the plaintiffs fell. There was also testimony from both the plaintiffs' and the defendants' experts that the use of a twelvepenny nail would be sufficient to hold the bracket to the roof and would not be causative of the collapse of the planking that occurred in this case.

The defendants also introduced evidence, through expert testimony, that DeLuca had violated the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations by failing to provide additional fall protection for the plaintiffs while they were working on the New Canaan Nature Center roof. The plaintiffs offered, and the jury reasonably could have found, however, that OSHA, in its investigation of the plaintiffs' accident, did not find any violations of roofing standards at the project site and that the roof brackets were an acceptable method of providing fall protection.

The jury also reasonably could have found that the roof bracket designed and manufactured by Quality Steel and used by the plaintiffs before the platform collapsed was undersized in comparison to the manufacturing specifications. Specifically, both the plaintiffs' and the defendants' experts testified that the platform arm of the roof bracket was thinner than required by Quality Steel's own specifications.¹¹ Additionally, the jury, through their special interrogatories, found that Quality Steel's product was defective and unreasonably dangerous at the time it was manufactured and sold by the defendants, and that the defective condition of the product was a proximate cause of the plaintiffs' accident. See footnote 8 of this opinion.

I

The plaintiffs claim that the trial court improperly instructed the jury on the doctrine of superseding cause because: (1) the plaintiffs' injuries were not outside the scope of the risk created by the defendants' misconduct in manufacturing and selling a defective product; and (2) any negligence on the part of DeLuca was not the sole proximate cause of the plaintiffs' injuries. The defendants claim, in response, that the combined negligence of the plaintiffs, DeLuca and Manizza, constituted sufficient evidence of a superseding cause, thereby exonerating the defendants from the plaintiffs' product liability claim. We need not consider the propriety of the trial court's instructions on the doctrine of superseding cause because we conclude that the doctrine should be abandoned in a case such as the present one.

We begin our analysis with an examination of the relationship among proximate cause, concurrent cause and superseding cause. "Proximate cause results from a sequence of events unbroken by a superseding cause, so that its causal viability continued until the moment of injury or at least until the advent of the immediate injurious force." Coburn v. Lenox Homes, Inc., 186 Conn. 370, 383, 441 A.2d 620 (1982). "[T]he test of proximate cause is whether the defendant's conduct is a substantial factor in bringing about the plaintiff's injuries." (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Paige v. St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church Corp., 250 Conn. 14, 25, 734 A.2d 85 (1999). A concurrent cause is one that is "contemporaneous and coexistent with the defendant's wrongful conduct and actively cooperates with the defendant's conduct to bring about the injury." Wagner v. Clark Equipment Co., 243 Conn. 168, 183, 700 A.2d 38 (1997). Finally, "[a] superseding cause is an act of a third person or other force which by its intervention prevents the actor from being liable for harm to another which his antecedent negligence is a substantial factor in bringing about."¹² (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Id., 179.

"The function of the doctrine of superseding cause is not to serve as an independent basis of liability, regardless of the conduct of a third party whose negligent conduct may have contributed to the plaintiff's loss. The function of the doctrine is to define the circumstances under which responsibility may be shifted entirely from the shoulders of one person, who is determined to be negligent, to the shoulders of another person, who may also be determined to be negligent, or to some other force." (Emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted.) Id. "Thus, the doctrine of superseding cause serves as a device by which one admittedly negligent party can, by identifying another's...