Laaperi v. Sears Roebuck & Co., Inc. 787 F.2d 726 U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit March 31, 1986

Campbell, Chief Judge. actions were brought by Albin Laaperi as administrator This is an appeal from jury verdicts totaling $1.8 million entered in a product liability suit against defendants Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Pittway Corporation. The of the estates of his three sons, all of whom were killed in a fire in their home in December 1976, and as father and next friend of his daughter, Janet, who was injured in the fire. Plaintiff's theory of recovery was that de- fendants had a duty to warn plaintiff that a smoke detector powered by house current, manufactured by Pittway, and sold to Laaperi by Sears might not operate in the event of an electrical fire caused by a short circuit. Defendants contend on appeal that the district court erred in denying their motions for directed verdict and judgment notwithstanding the verdict; that the admis- sion into evidence of purportedly undisclosed expert testimony violated Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(e); and that the award of $750,000 for injuries to Janet Laaperi was excessive and improper. We affirm the judgments in favor of plaintiff in his capacity as administrator of the estates of his three sons, but vacate the judgment in favor of Janet Laaperi, and remand for a new trial lim- ited to the issue of her damages. In March 1976, plaintiff Albin Laaperi purchased a smoke detector from Sears. The detector, manufac- tured by the Pittway Corporation, was designed to be powered by AC (electrical) current. Laaperi installed the detector himself in one of the two upstairs bed- rooms in his home. Early in the morning of December 27, 1976, a fire broke out in the Laaperi home. The three boys in one of the upstairs bedrooms were killed in the blaze. Laaperi's 13-year-old daughter, Janet, who was sleeping in the other upstairs bedroom, received burns over 12 percent of her body and was hospitalized for three weeks. The uncontroverted testimony at trial was that the smoke detector did not sound an alarm on the night of the fire. The cause of the fire was later found to be a short circuit in an electrical cord that was located in a cedar closet in the boys' bedroom. The Laaperi home had two separate electrical circuits in the upstairs bedrooms: one that provided electricity to the outlets and one that powered the lighting fixtures. The smoke detector had been connected to the outlet circuit, which was the cir- cuit that shorted and cut off. Because the circuit was shorted, the AC-operated smoke detector received no power on the night of the fire. Therefore, although the detector itself was in no sense defective (indeed, after the fire the charred detector was tested and found to be operable), no alarm sounded. Laaperi brought this diversity action against de- fendants Sears and Pittway, asserting negligent design, negligent manufacture, breach of warranty, and neg- ligent failure to warn of inherent dangers. The parties agreed that the applicable law is that of Massachu- setts. Before the claims went to the jury, verdicts were directed in favor of the defendants on all theories of liability other than failure to warn. Laaperi's claim under the failure to warn theory was that he was unaware of the danger that the very short circuit which might ignite a fire in his home could, at the same time, incapacitate the smoke detector. He contended that had he been warned of this danger, he would have purchased a battery- powered smoke detector as a backup or taken some other precaution, such as wiring the detector to a cir- cuit of its own, in order better to protect his family in the event of an electrical fire. The jury returned verdicts in favor of Laaperi in all four actions on the failure to warn claim. The jury as- sessed damages in the amount of $350,000 in each of the three actions brought on behalf of the deceased sons, and $750,000 in the action brought on behalf of Janet Laaperi. The defendants' motions for directed verdict and judgment notwithstanding the verdict were denied and defendants appealed. Defendants contend that the district court erred in denying their motions for directed verdict and judgment n.o.v. First, they claim that they had no duty to warn that the smoke detector might not work in the event of some electrical fires. Second, they maintain that even if they had such a duty, there was insuffi- cient evidence on the record to show that the failure to warn proximately caused plaintiff's damages. We address these arguments in turn. A. Duty to Warn We must look, of course, to Massachusetts law. While we have found no cases with similar facts in Massa- chusetts (or elsewhere), we conclude that on this record a jury would be entitled to find that defendants had a duty to warn. In Massachusetts, a manufacturer* can be found liable to a user of the product if the user is injured due to the failure of the manufacturer to exercise reasonable care in warning potential users of hazards associated with use of the product.... The manufacturer can be held liable even if the product does exactly what it is supposed to do, if it does not warn of the potential dangers inherent in the way a product is designed. It is not necessary that the product be negligently designed or manufactured; the failure to warn of hazards associated with fore- seeable uses of a product is itself negligence, and if that negligence proximately results in a plaintiff's injuries, the plaintiff may recover.... *Defendants make no argument that the duty of Sears is any different from that of Pittway, the actual manufacturer. In the present case, Sears advertised the smoke detector as a "Sears Early One Fire Alarm." Pittway Corp. was not mentioned any- where in these advertisements or in the 12-page owner's man- ual packaged with the detector. Where a seller puts out a product manufactured by another as its own, the seller is sub- ject to the same liability as though it were the manufacturer...The sole purpose of a smoke detector is to alert occupants of a building to the presence of fire. The failure to warn of inherent nonobvious limitations of a smoke detector, or of non-obvious circumstances in which a detector will not function, can, we believe, "create an unreasonable risk of harm in that the inha- bitants of a structure may be lulled into an unjustified sense of safety and fail to be forewarned of the exis- tence of a fire."... In the present case, the defendants failed to warn purchasers that a short circuit which causes an electrical fire may also render the smoke detector useless in the very situation in which it is ex- pected to provide protection: in the early stages of a fire. We believe that whether such a failure to warn was negligent was a question for the jury. To be sure, it was the fire, not the smoke detector per se, that actually killed and injured plaintiff's chil- dren. But as the Second Circuit recently held, the manufacturer of a smoke detector may be liable when, due to its negligence, the device fails to work: Although a defect must be a substantial factor in causing a plaintiff's injuries, it is clear that a "manu- facturer's liability for injuries proximately caused by these defects should not be limited to [situations] in which the defect causes the accident, but should ex- tend to situations in which the defect caused injuries over and above that which would have occurred from the accident, but for the defective design." It is true that, unlike the above, there was no defect of design or manufacture in this case. But there was evi- dence from which it could be inferred that the absence of a warning enhanced the harm resulting from the fire. Plaintiff testified that if he had realized that a short cir- cuit that caused an electrical fire might at the same time disable the smoke detector, he would have purchased a back-up battery-powered detector or wired the detector in question into an isolated circuit, thus minimizing the danger that a fire-causing short circuit would render the detector inoperative. We find, therefore, a sufficient connection between the children's deaths and injury and the absence of any warning. Defendants contend that the district court never- theless erred in denying their motions because, they claim, the danger that an electrical fire will incapacitate an electric-powered smoke detector is obvious. They point out that anyone purchasing a device powered by house electrical current will necessarily realize that if the current goes off for any reason, the device will not work. In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, a failure to warn amounts to negligence only where the supplier of the good known to be dangerous for its intended use "has no reason to believe that those for whose use the chattel is supplied will realize its dangerous condition."... Where the risks of the product are discernible by casual inspection, such as the danger that a knife can cut, or a stove burn, the consumer is in just as good a position as the manufacturer to gauge the dangers associated with the product, and nothing is gained by shifting to the manufacturer the duty to warn. Thus, a manufacturer is not required to warn that placing one's hand into the blades of a potato chopper will cause injury, ... that permitting a three-year-old child to ride on the running board of a moving tractor risks injury to the child, ... or that firing a BB gun at another at close range can injure or kill.... If a manufacturer had to warn consumers against every such obvious danger inherent in a product, "[t]he list of obvious practices warned against would be so long, it would fill a volume."... Defendants ask us to declare that the risk that an electrical fire could incapacitate an AC-powered smoke detector is so obvious that the average consumer would not benefit from a warning. This is not a trivial argument; in earliersome might say sounderdays, we might have accepted it.... Our sense of the current state of the tort law in Massachusetts and most other jurisdictions, however, leads us to conclude that, today, the matter before us poses a jury question; that "obviousness" in a situation such as this would be treated by the Massachusetts courts as presenting a question of fact, not of law. To be sure, it would be obvious to anyone that an electrical outage would cause this smoke detector to fail. But the average purchaser might not comprehend the specific danger that a fire-causing electrical problem can simul- taneously knock out the circuit into which a smoke detector is wired, causing the detector to fail at the very moment it is needed. Thus, while the failure of a detector to function as the result of an electrical mal- function due, say, to a broken power line or a neigh- borhood power outage would, we think, be obvious as a matter of law, the failure that occurred here, being associated with the very riskfirefor which the device was purchased, was not, or so a jury could find. ... We think that the issue of obviousness to the average consumer of the danger of a fire-related power outage was one for the jury, not the court, to determine. In the present case, the jury was specifically instructed that if it found this danger to be obvious it should hold for the defendants. It failed to do so. B. Causation While, as just discussed, the danger the detector would fail in these circumstances was not so obvious as to eliminate, as a matter of law, any need to warn, we must also consider whether Laaperi's specialized electrical knowledge constituted a bar to his own recovery.... [P]laintiff's specialized knowledge is immaterial to whether defendants had a duty to warn, since that duty is defined by the knowledge of the average purchaser. But plaintiff's expertise is relevant to whether defendants' failure to warn caused plain- tiff's damages. Even though defendants may have been required to provide a warning, plaintiff may not recover if it can be shown that because of his above- average knowledge, he already appreciated the very danger the warning would have described. In such event there would be no connection between the negligent failure to warn and plaintiff's damages. Defendants here presented considerable evidence suggesting that Laaperi, who was something of an electrical handyman, knew of the danger and still took no precautions. Laaperi, however, offered evidence that he did not know of the danger, and that he would have guarded against it had he been warned.... Self-serving as this testimony was, the jury was free to credit it. In reviewing the denial of a motion for directed verdict or judgment n.o.v., we are obliged to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict winner.... In light of this standard, we cannot say that the district court erred in denying defendants' motions for directed verdict and judgment n.o.v., for the jury could have believed Laaperi's testimony in the colloquy quoted above, among other evidence, and concluded that had he been properly warned, Laaperi would have instituted different fire detection methods in his home to protect his family against the danger that his smoke detector would be rendered useless in the event of a fire-related power outage. IV. ... Considering Janet's injuries alone, apart from the horrible nature of her brothers' deaths, we find the award of $750,000 was so grossly disproportionate to the injuries of Janet Laaperi as to be unconscionable. It is therefore vacated. The judgments in favor of Albin Laaperi in his capacity as administrator of the estates of his three sons are affirmed. In the action on behalf of Janet Laaperi, the verdict of the jury is set aside, the judg- ment of the district court vacated, and the cause re- manded to that court for a new trial limited to the issue of damages. So ordered.

Please brief the caseLaaperi v. Sears Roebuck & Co., Inc.by using the order

FACTS:

ISSUE:

Holding:

REASONING: