Barry v. Quality Steel Products, Inc.

• Decision Date: 12 September 2006
• Docket Number: No. 17453.,17453.
• Citation: 280 Conn. 1,905 A.2d 55
• Parties: Neil BARRY et al. v. QUALITY STEEL PRODUCTS, INC., et al. Bernard Cohade et al. v. Quality Steel Products, Inc., et al.
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court

Page 55

905 A.2d 55

280 Conn. 1

Neil BARRY et al. v. QUALITY STEEL PRODUCTS, INC., et al.

Bernard Cohade et al. v. Quality Steel Products, Inc., et al.

No. 17453.

Supreme Court of Connecticut.

Argued November 23, 2005.

Decided September 12, 2006.

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Philip T. Newbury, Jr., with whom, on the brief, was Kristan M. Maccini, Hartford, for the appellants (named defendant et al.).

Andrew J. Maloney III, New York, NY, pro hac vice, with whom was Joel T. Faxon, New Haven, for the appellees (plaintiffs).

Rachel M. Pattison, for the appellee (intervening plaintiff).

BORDEN, NORCOTT, KATZ, PALMER and ZARELLA, Js.

BORDEN, J.

This is the second appeal in these consolidated product liability actions. The first appeal followed a judgment rendered for the defendants, Quality Steel Products, Inc. (Quality Steel), and Qual-Craft Industries, Inc., after a jury verdict in the defendants' favor. In that appeal, we reversed the judgment in part and ordered a new trial. Barry v. Quality Steel Products, Inc., 263 Conn. 424, 427, 820 A.2d 258 (2003).¹

The defendants jointly appeal² from the judgment rendered, following a jury trial, in favor of the named plaintiffs, Neil Barry and Bernard Cohade.³ The defendants claim that the trial court improperly: (1) refused to instruct the jury that it could apportion responsibility for the plaintiffs' injuries to their employer, DeLuca Construction Company (DeLuca), pursuant to the comparative responsibility provisions of General Statutes § 52-572o; (2) ruled that, absent agreement of counsel, it would permit no additional discovery or expert disclosures concerning any matter that could have been discovered or disclosed prior to the first trial; (3) excluded as inadmissible hearsay certain photographic evidence proffered by the defendants; (4) denied the jury's request for access during deliberations to a demonstrative exhibit relied on by the defendants during the trial; (5) excluded evidence that the plaintiffs were not wearing personal fall protection while working on the roof; and (6) awarded the plaintiffs costs for both trials. We affirm the judgment of the trial court.

The plaintiffs brought these product liability actions pursuant to General Statutes § 52-572m et seq. against the defendants, alleging that they had suffered injuries caused by the failure of an allegedly defective roof bracket manufactured by the defendants.⁴ The case was tried to a jury and resulted in a defendants' verdict. The plaintiffs appealed, contending, inter alia, that the jury had been misled by the trial court's instruction on superseding cause. We agreed that the jury charge was misleading, and ordered a new trial. Id., at 446, 820 A.2d 258. This second trial resulted in a jury verdict for the plaintiffs. The defendants now appeal from the judgment rendered for the plaintiffs in accordance with the verdict.

The jury reasonably could have found the following facts. The plaintiffs were employed as master carpenters for DeLuca. On the day of the accident, they were installing a new roof on an addition to the New Canaan Nature Center. While the plaintiffs worked on the roof, they stood on staging that was attached to the roof with brackets designed and manufactured by the defendants. Sometime in mid-morning, the plaintiffs and their supervisor, Nate Manizza, had attached the brackets to the roof with nails.⁵

Neither of the plaintiffs nor Manizza recalled noticing who had attached the defective bracket to the roof. Once the brackets were attached, the plaintiffs and Manizza began putting shingles on the roof. They broke for lunch, then returned to continue working on the roof. Soon after lunch, Manizza climbed down from the roof to make a telephone call. At that time, the staging that the plaintiffs were working on slid out from underneath them, and they fell to the ground, sustaining serious injuries. After the plaintiffs were taken away by ambulance, Gene Marini, a senior superintendent with DeLuca, examined the site and discovered a deformed bracket on the ground where the plaintiffs had landed.

In the first trial, the jury found that the defendants' roof bracket was defective, unreasonably dangerous and a proximate cause of the accident. Id., at 429-30 n. 8, 820 A.2d 258. The jury also found, however, that the combined conduct of the plaintiffs, Manizza and DeLuca functioned as a superseding cause, and, based on that finding, rendered a verdict in favor of the defendants.⁶ Id. On appeal, this court concluded that the doctrine of superseding cause "no longer plays a useful role in our common law of proximate cause." Id., at 427, 820 A.2d 258. We therefore abolished the doctrine in cases "wherein a defendant claims that its tortious conduct is superseded by a subsequent negligent act or there are multiple acts of negligence." Id., at 439 n. 16, 820 A.2d 258. Accordingly, we reversed the judgment of the trial court in favor of the defendants and ordered a new trial.⁷ Id., at 452, 820 A.2d 258. In this second trial, the jury found for the plaintiffs and awarded economic and noneconomic damages in the amount of $1,298,000 to Barry and $898,000 to Cohade.⁸ This appeal followed.

I

The defendants first claim that the trial court improperly refused to instruct the jury that it could apportion responsibility for the plaintiffs' injuries to DeLuca pursuant to the comparative responsibility provisions of § 52-572o.⁹ More specifically, the defendants claim that, because DeLuca is a "party" to the action, the various provisions of § 52-572o providing for apportionment of liability damages to a "party"; see General Statutes § 52-572o (b) and (d); apply to DeLuca and, therefore, the court should have instructed the jury that, if it found that DeLuca had been negligent and that DeLuca's negligence had caused, at least in part, the plaintiffs' injuries, the jury should apportion some measure of liability for the plaintiffs' injuries to DeLuca. As the basis for their claim that the jury should have been allowed to apportion some measure of liability to DeLuca, the defendants point to DeLuca's alleged negligent failure to provide fall protection for the plaintiffs while they worked on the roof. We disagree. We conclude, to the contrary, that the references to "party" in § 52-572o do not include an employer that has intervened in the action to seek reimbursement of workers' compensation benefits paid to the plaintiffs.

We first note that DeLuca intervened in these actions solely pursuant to General Statutes § 31-293(a) in order to seek reimbursement for the workers' compensation payments that it was required to make to the plaintiffs. We also note that, pursuant to the exclusivity provision of the Workers' Compensation Act; General Statutes § 31-284(a); the plaintiffs could not sue DeLuca for any of their injuries. See footnote 7 of this opinion.

The question of whether § 52-572o requires a jury to consider the proportionate liability of an employer who is subject to the exclusivity provision of § 31-284,¹⁰ and to reduce the percentage of liability of other parties accordingly, presents a question of statutory interpretation and is therefore subject to plenary review. "The process of statutory interpretation involves the determination of the meaning of the statutory language as applied to the facts of the case, including the question of whether the language does so apply." School Administrators of Waterbury v. Waterbury Financial Planning & Assistance Board, 276 Conn. 355, 364, 885 A.2d 1219 (2005). As always, we begin with the language of the statute.¹¹

It is a basic tenet of statutory construction that "[w]e construe a statute as a whole and read its subsections concurrently in order to reach a reasonable overall interpretation." (Internal quotation marks omitted.) In re Steven M., 264 Conn. 747, 757, 826 A.2d 156 (2003). Applying this principle to § 52-572o, which sets forth the rules governing the allocation of comparative responsibility among parties in product liability actions, leads us to conclude that the statute does not contemplate, and is inconsistent with, the apportionment of a percentage of the plaintiff's total damages to his employer who has intervened in the action to recoup the workers' compensation payments made by the employer.

The first subsection of the statute provides that, in a claim brought in a product liability action, "the comparative responsibility of, or attributed to, the claimant, shall not bar recovery but shall diminish the award of compensatory damages proportionately, according to the measure of responsibility attributed to the claimant." General Statutes § 52-572o (a). Section 52-572o accomplishes two goals. It requires the fact finder to determine the total amount of damages, irrespective of the plaintiff's fault, that is, the amount of damages the plaintiff "would receive if comparative responsibility were disregarded . . . ." General Statutes § 52-572o (b)(1). It also requires the fact finder to allocate that total amount of damages among the parties, including the plaintiff, according to their respective percentages of responsibility. General Statutes § 52-572o (b)(2). Thus, for example, a plaintiff who is 25 percent responsible for his injuries will have his total amount of proven damages discounted or reduced by 25 percent, and the remaining 75 percent of his damages will be allocated among the liable defendants according to their respective degrees of responsibility. It is apparent, therefore, that in the application of this system of pure comparative responsibility, the more defendants among whom the responsibility for the plaintiff's net award — i.e., his total proven damages discounted by his degree of responsibility — may be allocated, the smaller the proportional share of liability that is likely to be allocated to each defendant, and, accordingly, the smaller the proportional share of the total damages that the plaintiff will be...