Chestnut v. Ford Motor Company, 14844.

• Decision Date: 13 July 1971
• Docket Number: No. 14844.,14844.
• Citation: 445 F.2d 967
• Parties: Grady Paul CHESTNUT, Appellant, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

445 F.2d 967 (1971)

Grady Paul CHESTNUT, Appellant, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Appellee.

No. 14844.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued March 4, 1971.

Decided July 13, 1971.

Emanuel Emroch, Richmond, Va. (Emroch, Cowan & Kauffman, and Frank N. Cowan, and Herman Abady, Richmond, Va., on brief), for appellant.

Aubrey R. Bowles, III, Richmond, Va. (Aubrey R. Bowles, Jr., and Bowles & Boyd, Richmond, Va., on brief), for appellee.

Before BOREMAN, BRYAN, and CRAVEN, Circuit Judges.

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge:

This is a products liability case involving a 1967 Mercury Cougar automobile manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The plaintiff, Grady Paul Chestnut, is a 28-year-old career soldier who purchased the car, while home on leave from Vietnam, from the Daniel Motor Company in Craigsville, Virginia, a few hours prior to noon on August 12, 1967. At approximately 1 a. m. on August 13, 1967, less than 24 hours after the purchase, Chestnut was driving his new car on a mountain road five or six miles from his parents' home in Neola, West Virginia. The automobile left the road and crashed into a ravine. As a result of the accident, Grady Chestnut was paralyzed from the neck down. Louise Rider, the only other passenger in the automobile at the time of the accident, also received injuries.

Chestnut filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia charging the Ford Motor Company and the Daniel Motor Company with liability for his injuries. The 1967 Mercury Cougar was equipped with a headlight lid closure system. If the system is operating properly, turning off the headlights at the dashboard causes metal opaque lids to close over the headlights. Turning the headlights on causes the lids to retract allowing light projection. Plaintiff's theory of the cause of the accident is that the system was not operating properly — that the lids closed over the headlights while Grady Chestnut was driving and that he lost control of the automobile in the sudden darkness. The defendant's theory of the accident is that it was caused by driver error.

The complaint was predicated on a number of theories of liability including breach of warranty, negligence in design and manufacture, and strict liability in tort. The Daniel Motor Company was dismissed from the action during the trial on the plaintiff's motion and the action proceeded against the Ford Motor Company. At the close of the testimony, the district court submitted the case to the jury solely on the breach of warranty theory. The jury returned a verdict for Ford Motor Company. From the district court's ensuing judgment for the defendant Grady Chestnut appeals. We find a number of errors of sufficient magnitude to compel us to vacate the judgment and remand for a new trial.

I.

Plaintiff contends that the district court's refusal to submit the case to the jury on the alternative theories of strict liability in tort and negligence in design was error. We think not.

The standard of safety of goods imposed on the seller or manufacturer of a product is essentially the same whether the theory of liability is labelled warranty or negligence or strict tort liability: the product must not be unreasonably dangerous at the time that it leaves the defendant's possession if employed in the manner in which it was intended to be used or put to a special use known beforehand by the defendant.¹

The only difference between negligence and strict tort liability is that the plaintiff attempting to prove negligence must prove an additional element, i. e., not only that the product was dangerously defective at the time that it left the defendant's hands, but also that the defect was the result of the defendant's failure to exercise due care. Other than that, the differences between the three rationales of liability consist of varying defenses available to the defendant depending upon whether the theory of the forum is tort or contract: in a tort action, the defendant may raise the defense of contributory negligence; in a contract action, the defendant may raise defenses of lack of privity, lack of notice of the breach, express disclaimer of the warranty, or contractual assumption of risk.² None of these defenses were raised by the defendant in this action.

On the facts of this case, the instructions to the jury given by the district court in terms of breach of warranty were functionally equivalent to instructions that might have been given in strict liability terms or in negligence terms. Because the safety standard of the product is the same in all three, only confusion could have resulted from charging the jury with respect to the different theories of liability. Actually, the failure to charge on a negligence theory may have been beneficial to plaintiff for doing so would have required consideration of an extra element: whether the defect spoke for itself to show a failure to exercise due care in manufacture. We think the district court wisely chose one theory only for revelation to the jury and its refusal to give instructions in terms of negligence and strict tort liability was not error.

II.

Much of the testimony at the trial centered around plaintiff's attempt to trace the alleged failure of the headlight closure system to a defect in a solenoid coil. A solenoid coil is a spool of wire. When an electrical current is passed through the wire, an electromagnetic field is created. A steel rod is placed in the center of the spool. When the current is turned on, the magnetic field pulls the rod into the center of the spool. When the current is turned off, a spring attached to the rod pulls it away from the center of the spool. The movement of the rod is transferred through a series of other devices to open and close the headlight covers. The important feature of this system for purposes of this case is that the spring attached to the rod will move the rod away from the center of the solenoid if there is any interruption in the electrical current through the solenoid wire, and thus any interruption in the current will cause the lids to close over the headlights.

Each end of the solenoid wire is attached to a metal terminal. A wire from the headlight switch is attached to one of the terminals — the "hot" terminal — thus providing an electrical current when the headlights are turned on. A wire leads from the other terminal — the "ground" terminal — to the frame of the automobile completing the electrical circuit. Plaintiff's experts removed the solenoid unit from the wrecked automobile and discovered that electricity would not pass through the solenoid. X-ray and subsequent microscopic examination revealed a crack in the "hot" terminal and a partial crack in the "ground" terminal. Plaintiff's experts testified that it was their opinion that both terminals were partially cracked when they were bent in the manufacturing process and that, while Grady Chestnut was driving the automobile, the electricity passing through the solenoid burned through the remaining portion of the "hot" terminal causing the headlight covers to close. The conclusions of plaintiff's experts were, of course, challenged by the conclusions of defendant's expert witnesses.

After the district judge instructed the jury as to the elements of breach of warranty that the plaintiff was required to prove, he made the following statement:

"This is not a difficult case. It is not a technical case in the sense that there are many, many issues. You know where the burden is, as in every case. If you believe that the warranty was breached, that is what caused it, that the electrical system was bad by virtue of this valve referring to the solenoid coil when it left that factory, and that the lights went out and caused it, that is it. Don\'t go outside the evidence to speculate what might have happened. Decide it from the evidence in this case. And if it turns out that you don\'t accept that, don\'t believe it is proven by a preponderance of the evidence, that is the end of it and you find for the defendant."

The plaintiff argues on appeal that this portion of the judge's charge to the jury placed on him a burden of proof that he was not required to carry, i. e., proof of the specific nature of the defect. He contends that all he is required to prove is that the product was defective at the time it left the factory, and that the defect was the proximate cause of the accident, and that the jury could have resolved the dispute between the expert witnesses about the defective solenoid coil in Ford's favor and still have properly concluded that the headlight closing mechanism was defective when it left the Ford factory. Plaintiff refers us to a number of cases in support of his position that he was not required to prove a specific defect, i. e., precisely why there was malfunction of the headlights. See e. g., Kridler v. Ford Motor Co., 422 F.2d 1182 (3d Cir. 1970); Franks v. National Dairy Products Corp., 414 F.2d 682 (5th Cir. 1969).

We need not determine whether the applicable state law³ would require proof of a specific defect since the defendant seems to agree that requiring proof of a specific defect would be improper.⁴ Defendant contends, however, that the charge did not require plaintiff to prove a specific defect, that the district judge properly instructed the jury that plaintiff only had to prove the automobile was defective, and that the quoted portion of the charge is merely a comment on the evidence that the jury was entitled to disregard.

Reading the charge as a whole, we conclude that the jury was limited to consideration of a defect in the solenoid coil. The district judge did not instruct the jury that the quoted portion of the charge was merely a comment on the evidence, or that they were entitled to consider whether the headlight closing lid was defective in operation otherwise than with regard to the solenoid. We think that the quoted portion could only have...