Scapa Dryer Fabrics Inc. v. Saville

• Decision Date: 23 March 2011
• Docket Number: No. 39,2010.,Sept. Term,39
• Parties: SCAPA DRYER FABRICS, INC.v.Carl L. SAVILLE.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

418 Md. 496

16 A.3d 159

SCAPA DRYER FABRICS, INC.

v.Carl L. SAVILLE.

No. 39

Sept. Term

2010.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

March 23, 2011.

David J. Shuster (Ezra S. Gollogly, Kramon & Graham, P.A., Baltimore; Malcolm S. Brisker, Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann, L.L.P., Baltimore), on brief, for petitioners.Michael T. Edmonds (Timothy J. Hogan, the Law Offices of Peter T. Nicholl, Baltimore), on brief, for respondent.Jerome A. Murphy, William L. Anderson, Andrew D. Kaplan, Crowell & Moring LLP, Washington, D.C., for Amicus Curiae brief of the Coalition for Litigation Justice, Inc.Argued before BELL, C.J., HARRELL, BATTAGLIA, GREENE, MURPHY, ADKINS and BARBERA, JJ.GREENE, J.

Petitioner, Scapa Dryer Fabrics, Inc. (“Scapa”), appeals the Court of Special Appeals's decision in Scapa v. Saville, 190 Md.App. 331, 988 A.2d 1059 (2010) (“ Saville II ”) affirming the judgment of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, which awarded damages to Respondent, Mr. Carl L. Saville (“Mr. Saville”).¹ Petitioner asks us to review alleged procedural errors by the trial judge, review the sufficiency of the evidence presented on the issue of causation regarding Respondent's negligence claim, and to reduce the amount of compensatory damages in light of settlement payments received by Respondent from special trusts created under federal bankruptcy law. We shall affirm the judgment in part and reverse in part and remand for further proceedings.

Facts and Procedural History

On June 14, 2002, Carl and Sharon Saville filed suit against approximately 30 companies ² claiming negligence, strict liability, loss of consortium, conspiracy and fraud relating to Mr. Saville's asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. A judgment against Scapa was entered on October 15, 2003 in the amount of $3,000,000.00. In an unreported opinion, the Court of Special Appeals vacated that judgment, Scapa v. Saville, No. 2172, Sept. Term, 2004 (Nov. 17, 2005) (“ Saville I ”) and remanded the case for a new trial. Prior to commencement of the new trial, Mr. Saville settled with three defendants, against whom Scapa unsuccessfully asserted cross-claims for joint tort-feasor liability and contribution, namely Viacom, Inc. f/k/a Westinghouse Electric Corp. (“Westinghouse”), AstenJohnson, Inc. (“Asten”), and Albany International Corp. (“Albany”). The new trial began on January 8, 2008 and concluded on January 25, 2008. The jury found Scapa and co-defendant Wallace and Gale Asbestos Settlement Trust (“W & G”) to be jointly and severally liable and returned a verdict in the amount of $1,718,000.00. The trial judge subsequently reduced the verdict to account for settlement payments that Mr. Saville had received from certain bankrupt asbestos-containing product manufacturers, namely Celotex Trust, the Johns Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, and the H.K. Porter, Inc. Asbestos Trust, resulting in a final verdict of $1,684,415.00. Scapa moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict (“JNOV”) as to Mr. Saville's claims and as to its cross-claims. Both motions were denied, as was Scapa's request, in the alternative, for a new trial, and for a reduction in the verdict to account for any and all bankruptcy trust payments received by Mr. Saville. Final judgment was entered on April 30, 2008 and appeals were timely noted.

The Court of Special Appeals affirmed the Circuit Court's judgment in Saville II, holding, relevant to the instant case: that there was sufficient evidence that Scapa's product was the proximate cause of Mr. Saville's injuries to support the trial court's denial of Scapa's motions for judgment and for JNOV; that Mr. Saville's “admissions” did not conclusively establish liability against the settling cross-defendants; that the trial judge's denial of Scapa's JNOV motion on its cross-claims would not be disturbed on the basis of procedural defects; and that the trial court had no evidence upon which to base further reduction of the verdict. Saville II, 190 Md.App. at 348, 351, 353, 988 A.2d at 1068, 1070–71.

Scapa presents the following questions to this Court, which we slightly reworded and reordered for clarity:

1. Did Mr. Saville present sufficient evidence to satisfy the “frequency, regularity, proximity” test for substantial factor causation of Scapa's products for his injuries?

2. Did Scapa preserve its right to move for JNOV on its cross-claims?

3. Did Mr. Saville's admissions under Md. Rule 2–424(d) “conclusively establish” liability against the settling cross-defendants?

4. Should the judgment against Scapa be reduced under the Maryland Uniform Contribution Among Joint Tortfeasors Act to account for payments that Mr. Saville received from trusts established pursuant to 11 U.S.C. § 524 of the Bankruptcy Code (“ § 524(g) Trusts”)?

I. Scapa's Balbos claim

Scapa challenges the Court of Special Appeals's application of the “frequency, regularity, proximity” test, enunciated in Eagle–Picher v. Balbos, which is the common law evidentiary standard used for establishing substantial-factor causation in negligence cases alleging asbestos exposure. Balbos, 326 Md. 179, 213, 604 A.2d 445, 461 (1992) (holding that “[t]he jury ... could find that the decedent was frequently exposed to fibers from the Eagle “66” asbestos cement in the proximity of the engine room of ships where that product was regularly used.”). Our task upon Scapa's challenge to the sufficiency of Mr. Saville's evidence, is to determine whether the intermediate appellate court's judgment upholding the trial court's dismissal of Scapa's motions for judgment and for JNOV on Mr. Saville's claims was in error.

An appellate court reviews “the trial court's decision to allow or deny judgment or JNOV to determine whether it was legally correct [,]” Saville II, 190 Md.App. at 343, 988 A.2d at 1065 (citing Houghton v. Forrest, 183 Md.App. 15, 26, 959 A.2d 816, 823–24 (2008)), while viewing the evidence and the reasonable inferences to be drawn from it in the light most favorable to the non-moving party, and determining whether the facts and circumstances only permit one inference with regard to the issue presented. See Md. Rule 2–519 (2010) (“Motion for Judgment”). We will find error in a denial of a motion for judgment or JNOV if the evidence “does not rise above speculation, hypothesis, and conjecture, and does not lead to the jury's conclusion with reasonable certainty.” Saville II, 190 Md.App. at 343, 988 A.2d at 1066 (quoting Bartholomee v. Casey, 103 Md.App. 34, 51, 651 A.2d 908 (1994)). Our resolution of this question in Scapa's favor would render the remaining questions moot, therefore, we address it first.

In Balbos, we described how a court would assess “whether the exposure of any given bystander to any particular supplier's product [would] be legally sufficient to permit a finding of substantial-factor causation,” noting that:

The finding involves the interrelationship between the use of a defendant's product at the workplace and the activities of the plaintiff at the workplace. This requires an understanding of the physical characteristics of the workplace and of the relationship between the activities of the direct users of the product and the bystander plaintiff. Within that context, the factors to be evaluated include the nature of the product, the frequency of its use, the proximity in distance and in time, of a plaintiff to the use of a product, and the regularity of the exposure of that plaintiff to the use of that product.

Balbos, 326 Md. at 210, 604 A.2d at 460 (emphasis added and citations omitted). Relying on the Balbos “frequency, regularity, proximity” test, the Court of Special Appeals held that there was “more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that [Mr. Saville] performed a significant amount of work on Scapa's product ... [that Mr. Saville] was significantly exposed to Scapa's product ... and that [the jury] did not contradict itself when it found [Scapa] liable and the [c]ross-[d]efendants not liable.” Saville II, 190 Md.App. at 345–48, 988 A.2d at 1067–68. Therefore, it upheld the trial court's denial of the motions, finding sufficient proffered evidence, when viewed in a light most favorable to Mr. Saville, to generate a jury question on causation. Saville II, 190 Md.App. at 345–48, 988 A.2d at 1067–68. Scapa asserts that “[t]he Court of Special Appeals's published opinion in Saville II stands for the proposition that a plaintiff in an asbestos product-liability case may reach the jury if he establishes the mere possibility of an undefined, unquantifiable exposure to asbestos[,]” and that the intermediate appellate court's holding “waters down” the Balbos test. We disagree.

Scapa raises five “evidentiary gaps,” which it asserts were fatal to Mr. Saville's negligence claim and made it impossible that a jury could have determined that the alleged injuries were caused by Scapa's dryer felts without resorting to “an untenable chain of speculative inferences,” namely: (1) no evidence on the amount of time Mr. Saville spent on the machine where Scapa's dryer felts were installed; (2) no evidence on his proximity to the second position of machine number 9 (“No. 9 Machine”) where Scapa's asbestos-containing felt indisputably ran; (3) no evidence on proximity of different machine positions to each other; (4) medical expert opinion testimony on the causation of Mr. Saville's mesothelioma based on “assumed facts that were never proven at trial;” and (5) no “discernable evidence” of the level of exposure to respirable asbestos fibers specifically caused by Scapa's felts.

A. Evidence of exposure

When viewed in the light most favorable to Mr. Saville, however, the evidence that Mr. Saville regularly handled and/or worked in arm's length to Scapa's asbestos-containing felts on a daily basis for at least one year was legally sufficient to permit a jury question on proximate cause, and, therefore, the denials of Scapa's motions for judgment and JNOV were...