Kinserlow v. CMI Corp., BID-WELL
| Decision Date | 12 May 2000 |
| Docket Number | No. 99-3668,BID-WELL,99-3668 |
| Citation | 217 F.3d 1021 |
| Parties | (8th Cir. 2000) DAVID KINSERLOW, APPELLANT, v. CMI CORPORATION,DIVISION, APPELLEE. Submitted: |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri -Eastern Division. [Copyrighted Material Omitted] Before Bowman and Loken, Circuit Judges, and Bataillon, 1 District Judge.
David Kinserlow appeals the district court's 2 grant of the motion for judgment as a matter of law made by CMI Corporation, Bid-Well Division, at the close of all the evidence in the trial of Kinserlow's personal injury claims. We affirm.
Kinserlow, a cement mason working for Fred Weber, Inc. (FWI), brought this action for personal injuries against CMI Corporation, Bid-Well Division (Bid-Well), after he fell from a bridge over a highway in St. Louis County, Missouri. At the time he fell, Kinserlow was operating a bull float, walking backwards and forward on a mini workbridge behind a Bid-Well paving machine, smoothing out concrete. The workbridge had tapered end sections, but no written or painted warnings or guard rails to alert workers that they were coming to the end of the workbridge. Kinserlow, walking backwards, fell from the end of the workbridge to the ground 18' below. He was severely hurt, and his injuries still cause him debilitating pain. His suit against Bid-Well 3 alleged strict liability and negligence. 4
The primary issue in the suit was the identity of the company that had manufactured the workbridge and then sold or supplied it to FWI. According to the testimony of Kinserlow's witnesses, Bid-Well and another company, Gomaco, both manufacture steel workbridges similar to the one from which Kinserlow fell. Kinserlow's workbridge had lost any identifying markings or labels it might have once had, having apparently been in FWI's inventory since before 1977. The primary evidentiary hurdle for Kinserlow was to establish that Bid-Well manufactured and then sold or supplied the workbridge to FWI. An FWI employee testified that at the time of Kinserlow's accident, FWI had two types of workbridges in inventory, one with filled-in metal triangles placed in the frame and another without filled-in metal triangles but with tapered end sections. Kinserlow's workbridge was one of the latter, and he alleged that Bid-Well had manufactured and sold or supplied it to FWI.
Two FWI employees testified that in their experience, once a concrete company purchased a workbridge and a paving machine, from whatever source, the two pieces of equipment are generally kept together as a set. Kinserlow himself testified that when he worked with a Bid-Well paving machine, he always used a workbridge identical to the one from which he fell. He also testified that when he worked for a different concrete company, he saw Bid-Well paving machines used with workbridges with tapered end sections like the one from which he fell. On the day of his accident, his workbridge was paired with a Bid-Well paving machine. The two pieces of equipment had been in FWI's inventory since at least 1977.
Kinserlow's witnesses offered no direct documentary evidence that Bid-Well had ever sold or supplied a workbridge to FWI prior to the date of the accident, and the FWI employee who would have been responsible for buying the workbridge is deceased. Kinserlow therefore attempted to establish through inference that Bid-Well had sold FWI the workbridge in question. For example, Thomas Held, the president of Allied Construction Company, Bid-Well's primary competitor in the steel workbridge market, testified during Kinserlow's case in chief that Allied Construction was the exclusive distributor of Gomaco paving machines and workbridges in the St. Louis area. Held testified that he could find but one invoice recording a sale of a Gomaco workbridge to FWI; that sale occurred in 1980 and did not involve the sale of a paving machine. He also testified that the Gomaco workbridges he was familiar with - those manufactured and sold after 1984, the year he began working for Allied Construction - all had metal triangles inserted in their frames, unlike the workbridge from which Kinserlow fell.
On cross-examination, however, Held testified that he could not say whether Gomaco workbridges manufactured and sold before 1984 had such triangles. He also did not know what types of workbridges FWI had in inventory on the day of the accident, whether FWI had purchased a Gomaco workbridge from a source other than Allied Construction, or whether Bid-Well had ever sold workbridges with tapered end sections. Kinserlow and his other witnesses made similar admissions on cross-examination: they did not know whether Bid-Well had ever manufactured or sold a workbridge with tapered end sections, or whether Bid-Well had ever sold or supplied a workbridge to FWI prior to the accident.
In contrast, Bid-Well's witness Daniel Napierala, a long-time Gomaco employee, testified that since 1968 when it began building workbridges, Gomaco alone had been making workbridges with tapered end sections. Napierala said that he had never seen a tapered end section built by Bid-Well or by any other competitor in his seventeen years in the industry. He also testified that beginning in 1984, Gomaco began to put metal triangles on the frame of its workbridges so that warning labels could be attached to the workbridge. He further testified that as an exclusive Gomaco distributor, Allied Construction would have sold only new Gomaco equipment. FWI nevertheless could have acquired its inventory of Gomaco workbridges from a source other than Allied. Bid-Well's only other witness, Jack Lease, has been a Bid-Well employee since 1970. He was originally hired as a design draftsman, and is now Bid-Well's vice president and sales manager. He testified that Bid-Well began manufacturing and selling workbridges in 1975, but had never manufactured or sold workbridges with tapered end sections.
Kinserlow appeals the decision of the trial court to grant Bid-Well's motion, renewed at the close of evidence, for judgment as a matter of law under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50(a). The trial court found that Kinserlow failed to establish by a preponderance that Bid-Well -- rather than some other manufacturer -- had manufactured, sold, or distributed the tapered end section of the workbridge from which Kinserlow fell. Kinserlow argues that the trial court's decision to grant judgment as a matter of law was incorrect because the court improperly weighed the facts presented by the plaintiff against the facts presented by the defendant. Kinserlow contends that the court should have given him the benefit of all beneficial inferences and not considered any of Bid-Well's evidence except as it might have helped his case.
In both Rule 56 motions for summary judgment and Rule 50 motions for judgment as a matter of law, the inquiry is the same: "[W]hether the evidence presents a sufficient disagreement to require submission to a jury or whether it is so one-sided that one party must prevail as a matter of law." Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242, 251-52 (1986). Rule 50(a) allows the judge in a jury trial to enter judgment against a party with respect to a claim or defense "that cannot under the controlling law be maintained or defeated without a favorable finding on that issue," when the party has been fully heard on the issue and "there is no legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury to find for that party on the issue." Fed. R. Civ. P. 50(a).
Our review of the district court's decision is de novo, using the same standards as the district court. Stauch v. City of Columbia Hts., 212 F.3d 425, 429-30 (8th Cir.2000). The court views the evidence "in the light most favorable to the [nonmoving] party and must not engage in a weighing or evaluation of the evidence or consider questions of credibility." Smith v. World Ins. Co., 38 F.3d 1456, 1460 (8th Cir. 1994) (quoting White v. Pence, 961 F.2d 776, 779 (8th Cir. 1992)). The court should grant judgment as a matter of law "only when all of the evidence points one way and is 'susceptible of no reasonable inference sustaining the position of the nonmoving party.'" Id.
In a recent age-based employment discrimination case in which an employer appealed the district court's decision to deny its motion for judgment as a matter of law, the United States Supreme Court clarified the standard of review dictated by Rule 50. Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Prods., Inc., U.S., 120 S.Ct. 2097, L.Ed.2d (2000). The Court ruled that because the Fifth Circuit disregarded evidence supporting the employee's prima...
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