Bachtel v. TASER Int'l, Inc., No. 13-1445 (8th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CasePlaintiff filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against the city and several police officers after her son was shot in the chest with an electronic control device (ECD). After the case settled, plaintiff filed suit against TASER for products liability and negligence. The court concluded that plaintiff's failure to warn claim failed as a matter of law because she did not establish on the record that an additional warning would have changed the behavior of the officers involved; the district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding plaintiff's expert's testimony on the issue of whether a different or additional warning would have altered the officer's actions under the existing circumstances; even if the court were to conclude that there was a legitimate jury question as to whether the officer had been made aware of the specific risk of cardiac danger when the ECD was fired directly at the subject's chest, such a conclusion would be rebuttable by undisputed evidence in the record that he had not been instructed on available warnings and did not heed the limited training he had received; there was no genuine dispute on the record that the officer would not have read any additional warning TASER may have added as to the cardiac danger of the ECD in any of its product warnings or bulletins, or in any training materials prepared after January 1, 2005; even if an adequate warning had appeared, the officer would not have heeded it; and therefore, TASER was entitled to summary judgment on plaintiff's negligence and failure to warn claims where she failed to establish that an additional warning would have altered the behavior of the officer. The court also concluded that plaintiff failed to present evidence that the ECD device used by the officer was unreasonably dangerous as designed. Plaintiff's design defect claim failed as a matter of law where plaintiff failed to demonstrate any "specific design choices" that rendered the model unreasonably dangerous. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court's judgment and dismissed plaintiff's remaining claims as moot.
Court Description: Civil case - Products liability. Plaintiff's decedent died of cardiac arrest after being tasered by defendant's product, and she brought this action alleging failure to warn and defective design; regarding plaintiff's claim for strict liabilty for failure to warn, the district court did not abuse its discretion by excluding plaintiff's expert's testimony on the issue of whether a different or additional warning would have altered the actions of the officer who shot the device; even if an adequate warning had appeared in defendant's training materials, the record established that the officer would not have heeded it, and the presumption that the officer would have read and heeded a warning as to the cardiac danger of firing the device at a subject's chest was unavailable as a matter of law; as a result, plaintiff's failure to establish that an additional warning would have altered the officer's actions is necessarily fatal to her negligence claim for failure to warn, and defendant was entitled to summary judgment on plaintiff's failure to warn claims; plaintiff failed to present evidence that the device was unreasonably dangerous as designed and defendant was entitled to summary judgment on her defective design claim.
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