Reference no: EM132194802

CASE: Wedge v. Planters Lifesavers Co,

Richard Welge, forty-something but young in spirit, loves to sprinkle peanuts on his ice cream sundaes. On January 18, 1991, Karen Godfrey, with whom Welge boards, bought a 24-ounce vacuum-sealed plastic-capped jar of Planters peanuts for him at a K-Mart store in Chicago. To obtain a $2 rebate that the maker of Alka-Seltzer was offering to anyone who bought a "party" item, such as peanuts, Godfrey needed proof of her purchase of the jar of peanuts; so, using an Exacto knife (basically a razor blade with a handle), she removed the part of the label that contained the bar code. She then placed the jar on top of the refrigerator, where Welge could get at it without rooting about in her cupboards. About a week later, Welge removed the plastic seal from the jar, uncapped it, took some peanuts, replaced the cap, and returned the jar to the top of the refrigerator, all without incident. A week after that, on February 3, the accident occurred. Welge took down the jar, removed the plastic cap, spilled some peanuts into his left hand to put on his sundae, and replaced the cap with his right hand--but as he pushed the cap down on the open jar the jar shattered. His hand, continuing in its downward motion, was severely cut, and is now, he claims, permanently impaired. 34 Welge brought this products liability suit in federal district court under the diversity jurisdiction; Illinois law governs the substantive issues. Welge named three defendants (plus the corporate parent of one--why we don't know). They are K-Mart, which sold the jar of peanuts to Karen Godfrey; Planters, which manufactured the product--that is to say, filled the glass jar with peanuts and sealed and capped it; and Brockway, which manufactured the glass jar itself and sold it to Planters. After pretrial discovery was complete the defendants moved for summary judgment. The district judge granted the motion on the ground that the plaintiff had failed to exclude possible causes of the accident other than a defect introduced during the manufacturing process. 36 No doubt there are men strong enough to shatter a thick glass jar with one blow. But Welge's testimony stands uncontradicted that he used no more than the normal force that one exerts in snapping a plastic lid onto a jar. So the jar must have been defective. No expert testimony and no fancy doctrine are required for such a conclusion. A nondefective jar does not shatter when normal force is used to clamp its plastic lid on. The question is when the defect was introduced. It could have been at any time from the manufacture of the glass jar by Brockway (for no one suggests that the defect might have been caused by something in the raw materials out of which the jar was made) to moments before the accident. But testimony by Welge and Karen Godfrey, if believed--and at this stage in the proceedings we are required to believe it--excludes all reasonable possibility that the defect was introduced into the jar after Godfrey plucked it from a shelf in the K-Mart store. From the shelf she put it in her shopping cart. The checker at the check-out counter scanned the bar code without banging the jar. She then placed the jar in a plastic bag. Godfrey carried the bag to her car and put it on the floor. She drove directly home, without incident. After the bar-code portion of the label was removed, the jar sat on top of the refrigerator except for the two times Welge removed it to take peanuts out of it. Throughout this process it was not, so far as anyone knows, jostled, dropped, bumped, or otherwise subjected to stress beyond what is to be expected in the ordinary use of the product. Chicago is not Los Angeles; there were no earthquakes. Chicago is not Amityville either; no supernatural interventions are alleged. So the defect must have been introduced earlier, when the jar was in the hands of the defendants. 38 But, they argue, this overlooks two things. One is that Karen Godfrey took a knife to the jar. And no doubt one can weaken a glass jar with a knife. But nothing is more common or, we should have thought, more harmless than to use a knife or a razor 40 Page 211 42 The invitation, it is true, was issued by K-Mart, not by the other defendants; and we do not know their involvement, if any, in the promotion. As to them, the defense of misuse must fail, at this stage of the proceedings, for two other reasons. The evidence does not establish with the certitude required for summary judgment that the use of an Exacto knife to remove a label from a jar is a misuse of the jar. And in a regime of comparative negligence misuse is not a defense to liability but merely reduces the plaintiff's damages, unless the misuse is the sole cause of the accident. 44 Even so, the defendants point out, it is always possible that the jar was damaged while it was sitting unattended on the top of the refrigerator, in which event they are not responsible. Only if it had been securely under lock and key when not being used could the plaintiff and Karen Godfrey be certain that nothing happened to damage it after she brought it home. That is true--there are no metaphysical certainties--but it leads nowhere. Elves may have played ninepins with the jar of peanuts while Welge and Godfrey were sleeping; but elves could remove a jar of peanuts from a locked cupboard. The plaintiff in a products liability suit is not required to exclude every possibility, however fantastic or remote, that the defect which led to the accident was caused by someone other than one of the defendants. The doctrine of res ipsa loquitur teaches that an accident that is unlikely to occur unless the defendant was negligent is itself circumstantial evidence that the defendant was negligent. The doctrine is not strictly applicable to a products liability case because unlike an ordinary accident case the defendant in a products case has parted with possession and control of the harmful object before the accident occurs. St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins. Co. v. Michelin Tire Corp., 12 Ill.App.3d 165, 298 N.E.2d 289, 297-98 (1973). But the doctrine merely instantiates the broader principle, which is as applicable to a products case as to any other tort case, that an accident can itself be evidence of liability. [...] Normal people do not lock up their jars and cans lest something happen to damage these containers while no one is 46 Page 212 48 Of course, unlikely as it may seem that the defect was introduced into the jar after Karen Godfrey bought it if the plaintiffs' testimony is believed, other evidence might make their testimony unworthy of belief--might even show, contrary to all the probabilities, that the knife or some mysterious night visitor caused the defect after all. The fragments of glass into which the jar shattered were preserved and were examined by experts for both sides. The experts agreed that the jar must have contained a defect but they could not find the fracture that had precipitated the shattering of the jar and they could not figure out when the defect that caused the fracture that caused the collapse of the jar had come into being. The defendants' experts could neither rule out, nor rule in, the possibility that the defect had been introduced at some stage of the manufacturing process. The plaintiff's expert noticed what he thought was a preexisting crack in one of the fragments, and he speculated that a similar crack might have caused the fracture that shattered the jar. This, the district judge ruled, was not enough. 50 But if the probability that the defect which caused the accident arose after Karen Godfrey bought the jar of Planters peanuts is very small--and on the present state of the record we are required to assume that it is--then the probability that the defect was introduced by one of the defendants is very high. [...] 52 The strict-liability element in modern products liability law comes precisely from the fact that a seller subject to that law is liable for defects in his product even if those defects were introduced, without the slightest fault of his own for failing to discover them, at some anterior stage of production. [...] So the fact that K-Mart sold a defective jar of peanuts to Karen Godfrey would be conclusive of K-Mart's liability, and since it is a large and solvent firm there would be no need for the plaintiff to look further for a tortfeasor. This point seems to have been more or less conceded by the defendants in the district court--the thrust of their defense was that the plaintiff had failed to show that the defect had been caused by any of them--though this leaves us mystified as to why the plaintiff bothered to name additional defendants. 54 And even if, as we doubt, the plaintiff took on the unnecessary burden of proving that it is more likely than not that a given defendant introduced the defect into the jar, he might be able to avail himself of the rule of Ybarra v. Spangard, 25 Cal.2d 486, 154 P.2d 687 (1944), and force each defendant to produce some exculpatory evidence. [...] In fact K-Mart put in some evidence on the precautions it takes to protect containers of food from being damaged by jarring or bumping. A jury convinced by such evidence, impressed by the sturdiness of jars of peanuts (familiar to every consumer), and perhaps perplexed at how the process of filling a jar with peanuts and vacuum-sealing it could render a normal jar vulnerable to collapsing at a touch, might decide that the probability that the defect had been introduced by either K-Mart or Planters was remote. So what? Evidence of K-Mart's care in handling peanut jars would be relevant only to whether the defect was introduced after sale; if it was introduced at any 56 [...] 5860 Even the narrow holding of Erzrumly is probably wrong, in light of bottle and other container cases decided by Illinois courts both before and after, Tweedy v. Wright Ford Sales, Inc., 64 Ill.2d 570, 2 Ill.Dec. 282, 357 N.E.2d 449 (1976); Mabee v. Sutliff & Case Co., 404 Ill. 27, 88 N.E.2d 12 (Ill.1949); Fullreide v. Midstates Beverage Co., 70 Ill.App.3d 758, 27 Ill.Dec. 107, 388 N.E.2d 1070 (1979); Roper v. Dad's Root Beer Co., 336 Ill.App. 91, 82 N.E.2d 815 (1948), as well as by courts of other states. E.g., Van Duzer v. Shoshone Coca Cola Bottling Co., 103 Nev. 383, 741 P.2d 811 (1987) (per curiam); Virgil v. "Kash N' Karry" Service Corp., 61 Md.App. 23, 484 A.2d 652, 657 (Md.App.1984); Renninger v. Foremost Dairies, Inc., 171 So.2d 602, 604 (Fla.App.1965). Right or wrong, Erzrumly is plainly contrary to Fullreide; and obviously when state courts of the same level reach opposite conclusions, a federal court in a diversity case is not bound to follow either.

1. Explain the applicable law(s). 2. How did the court resolve the issue(s)? Who won? 3. Explain the logic that supported the court's decision