Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca11-14-13721/USCOURTS-ca11-14-13721-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Carnival Corporation
Appellee
Aide Sepulveda Torres
Appellant

Document Text:

[DO NOT PUBLISH]

IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT

________________________

No. 14-13721

________________________

D.C. Docket No. 1:12-cv-23370-JLK

AIDE SEPULVEDA TORRES,

 Plaintiff-Appellant,

versus

CARNIVAL CORPORATION, 

d.b.a. Carnival Cruise Lines, 

 Defendant-Appellee.

________________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Southern District of Florida

________________________

(November 20, 2015)

Before MARCUS, JILL PRYOR and FAY, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM: 

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Aide Sepulveda Torres appeals summary judgment granted to Carnival 

Corporation in her action alleging negligence, causing her to fall and injure herself

while disembarking from the Carnival Splendor. We affirm.

I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

Torres and her husband, Robert, had been passengers for a seven-day cruise 

on the Carnival Splendor out of Long Beach, California. At the conclusion of their 

cruise on July 24, 2011, the couple went to a lower deck and entered a queue to 

complete a standard exit interview before disembarking. Torres’s husband told her 

to disembark, and he would “catch up.” Torres, who was wearing elevated, 

platform shoes, approached the security booth to disembark thereafter by a ramp.

1

 

After clearing the security booth, Torres tripped on the ramp as she disembarked 

from the ship, fell forward on her left side, and sustained a shoulder fracture. 

While in line approaching the security booth, Torres testified she “didn’t 

really pay attention” to the other passengers ahead of her, as they disembarked. 

She and her husband, who saw her fall, testified at their depositions there were no 

passengers or obstructions in the walking path between the security booth and the 

exit doorway; only one person at a time could traverse the area between the 

 1 Torres wore sunglasses, but she removed them at the request of her interviewer. Across 

the room, sunlight streamed through an open watertight door, over which a two-sided ramp had 

been placed to assist passengers in accessing the outer deck of the ship. While there were no 

posted signs regarding the ramp, the carpet on the ramp was darker than the surrounding 

flooring.

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security booth and exit doorway to the ramp to leave the ship. Torres testified she 

was not paying attention, as she walked toward the carpeted ramp in the departing 

doorway:

Q: As you approached the doorway, was there anything obstructing 

you from seeing this black carpeted area?

A: No, sir.

Q: Did you see the black carpeted area as you walked toward the 

doorway?

A: Didn’t even pay attention, to be truthful. It was just like automatic. 

I just started to disembark.

The evidence is undisputed that Carnival employees, who inspected the scene 

shortly after Torres’s fall, did not identify any defective condition that could have 

caused her to fall.

Malcolm Stark, the chief of security for the Carnival Splendor, attended to 

Torres after her fall. Stark inspected the ramp and determined it had not shifted 

and there was “no damage to the carpet.” Olena Komarova, an assistant 

housekeeping manager, who had inspected the area earlier that morning, observed 

the outer deck was clean and dry, and the carpet on the ramp contained “no waves, 

. . . [bumps or] damages.” Stark, Komarova, and an accident adjuster for Carnival 

did not know of any other accidents on the threshold ramp.

Stark reviewed the surveillance recordings of the exit, but he “could not get 

any footage [of the accident] because of too much glare coming through the 

doors.” After Torres reported she had fallen on the downward slope of the ramp, 

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Stark and his chief assistant photographed the ramp from the outer deck. The 

photograph showed two yellow caution cones placed on each side of the ramp.

Stark explained there was insufficient clearance to place caution cones inside the 

departing room, and the two-sided threshold ramp was used during disembarkment 

from the Carnival Splendor exclusively at its home port in Long Beach, California.

He testified no other passenger had tripped on the two-sided threshold ramp.

Robert Torres completed a “Passenger Injury Statement” for his wife shortly 

after her fall, before he left the ship. He reported his wife had “walked out of [the] 

ship onto [the] deck, [and she] fell forward landing on [her] left side.” Robert

Torres attributed the accident to “[a] rise on [the] floor” or a “ramp.”

Torres filed a complaint in the Southern District of Florida, based on 

admiralty and diversity jurisdiction,

2 and alleged Carnival was negligent for 

covering the threshold with “a mat or similar material, which obscured, disguised, 

or hid the raised threshold”; “failing to properly supervise and/or monitor the 

disembarkation procedure”; “failing to properly assist [Torres] as she attempted 

[to] disembark the ship”; and “failing to warn passengers of the hazard of which 

[Carnival] knew or should have known in the exercise of reasonable care and of 

which [it] had [superior] knowledge.” Torres represented, “as she was stepping 

through the open passageway onto the exterior deck, . . . [she] tripped and fell over 

 2 Torres is a resident of California; Carnival is a Panamanian corporation, with its principal base 

of operations in Miami-Dade County, Florida. 

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[the] raised threshold that had been covered over with a mat or similar material, 

which obscured, disguised or hid the raised threshold.” She requested 

compensatory and “[a]ll other damages as allowable by law.”

Torres testified the lighting inside and outside the ship did not affect her 

eyesight; she did not require assistance to walk off the ship; she saw a “rise in the 

floor” and a “mat” consisting of “dark carpet” in front of the exterior door; and no

object or person obstructed her view of the ramp or her path to the outer deck. As 

she approached the doorway and not paying attention, Torres testified she suddenly 

“tripped, . . . stumbled” forward, reached for something to steady her, fell onto her 

left side, and then “slid a little bit right into the railing . . . right outside the doors,” 

which would have kept her from going overboard. She “remember[ed] [her] left 

foot hitting something” and thought the accident had “[s]omething to do with [the] 

mat,” which had an “elevation.” She asserted her fall began on the inclined section 

of the ramp.

Robert Torres testified he “just remember[ed] . . . [his] wife falling”; after 

recalling she wore a “platform shoe” on the day of her accident, however, he stated 

“she hit something, . . . a carpet, raised carpet or device that is put there, . . . 

start[ed] stumbling and trying to reach for something, . . . land[ed] on her left side 

and slid right to the outside rail of [the] ship.” Robert did not observe a defect in 

the carpet, when he examined the ramp shortly after his wife fell. He confirmed

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his wife began to fall on the “[i]nterior” side of the doorway “right from possibly 

the beginning part to maybe a foot in.”

Kevin Rider, a human-factors engineer retained by Torres, provided a report

in which he opined the height of the carpet affixed to the ramp interrupted the 

“swing phase of [Torres’s] foot” and caused her to fall. Rider prepared his report 

using photographs of the accident scene, Torres’s statement, exemplars of new 

carpet obtained from three companies that produced the model of carpet affixed to 

the ramp, documents produced by the parties, and their answers to interrogatories.

He opined Torres had tripped on “[t]he exposed edges” of the carpet because it 

“exceeded the maximum-1/4 requirement” for carpet thickness and for vertical 

changes in elevation endorsed in the 1994 Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities 

to the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the standards for Accessible 

and Usable Buildings and Facilities issued by the American National Standards 

Institute.

Rider concluded Carnival could have prevented the accident, if there had 

been “rubber borders to provide a slope or bevel of the edge” of the carpet, as 

recommended in the standards created by American Society of Testing and 

Materials, and “effective warnings,” such as “caution tape . . . [to] alert[] 

passengers of the trip hazard.” He opined three “factors affected Torres’s ability to 

detect and identify the raised surface of the incident doorway as a trip hazard”: (1)

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the “use of carpet to cover the threshold[, which] . . . violated [her] reasonable 

expectations of a flat, level and consistent walkway”; (2) “[t]he change in 

brightness between the interior and exterior of the doorway”; and (3) the lack of 

“effective warnings” on or near the flooring.

When deposed, Rider equivocated regarding what had caused Torres to fall. 

He testified “it’s more likely than not” Torres’s foot struck the front edge of the 

ramp because the carpet appeared in the photographs to be rounded instead of 

beveled. Rider conceded he had no information regarding whether the subject 

carpet edge was beveled or not. He also testified “it’s possible that [Torres]

tripped on the incline,” because “the whole [ramp] is above a quarter-of-an-inch” 

and creates a “trip hazard.” When questioned about the guidelines cited in his 

report, Rider acknowledged he did not “know the extent of [the] application” of the 

ADA guidelines to cruise ships, and the standards created by the Society of Testing 

were considered a “consensus standard,” which was treated as “relevant for the 

country” by the Standards Institute. Rider was unfamiliar with the Access Board, a 

federal agency that advocates for accessibility for the disabled, or any of its 

publications about the application of the ADA to passenger vessels.

Rider did not inspect the Carnival Splendor, measure the threshold ramp, or 

consider its slope as a factor in his analysis. He testified a ramp “can be” an 

acceptable means of traversing a high threshold, if it is “reasonably detectable or 

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conspicuous to someone that’s walking through on an otherwise level surface.”

Rider testified footwear “can be an issue in terms of walking,” but he did not think 

Torres’s platform shoes were a factor in her accident, because “research [had] 

show[ed] . . . that in most cases[,] . . . people . . . develop a gait pattern based on 

their shoes.” Although Torres was not paying attention, she was “blameless” in 

Rider’s opinion, because “the cause of [her] fall was an inconspicuous trip hazard,”

which was “foreseeable and predictable and supported by science of how people 

walk through a facility.” When asked what had “prevent[ed] [Torres] from seeing 

the ramp,” Rider answered only “the glare coming through the doorway.” He

conceded none of Torres’s “testimony . . . relate[d] to glare being an issue,” and 

he had “speculate[d]” from Stark’s testimony about the sunlight affecting the 

surveillance video that the “reflective glare” in the room “inhibite[d] [Torres] from 

detecting floor-level hazards.”

Carnival moved to exclude Rider’s testimony. In granting its motion, the 

judge determined Rider’s testimony about “floor features, lighting, and warnings” 

would “unnecessarily complicate[] the case.” He explained Rider’s testimony was 

not helpful, because jurors readily could “understand the simple mechanics of 

walking and the various reasons one [might] fall, including tripping on a carpet”; 

how the human eye requires “time to adjust” to changes in lighting and how 

“during that interval it is more difficult to see”; and whether the “placement, color, 

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size, etc. of cones” provided an adequate warning. The judge also determined that 

Rider’s “opinions [were] not based on a sufficiently reliable methodology,” and his 

“lack of first-hand investigation [made] the relevance of [his] experiments quite 

attenuated.” The judge reasoned Rider’s “methodology [was] questionable,” 

because Rider had “never investigated the subject vessel and felt it was 

unnecessary to do so”; his “analysis of the carpet [was] based on comparisons of 

swatches exemplary”; he was unable to “quantify the differences in lighting 

between the interior and exterior of the ship”; and he based his analysis of the 

lighting “on photographs . . . even though he acknowledge[d] that [they] do not 

adequately depict how ambient light is seen by the human eye.”

The district judge also granted Carnival’s summary judgment motion, 

because he concluded “there [was] no genuine issue of material fact” concerning

whether Carnival breached a duty to Torres, since she had failed to prove the 

carpet was “unreasonably dangerous.” “Given that the record evidence[d] no 

dispute that there was [a] hazard,” Carnival also did not have a duty to warn about 

a latent defect. In addition, the judge reasoned Carnival did not have a duty to 

warn about the “obvious hazard” created by the ramp, when Torres had testified 

she saw the “carpeted area and that there were no obstructions in her path.” The 

judge explained Torres’s claims that Carnival had a duty to assist her and to 

supervise her disembarkation failed, because Torres had “testified that she did not 

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feel she needed any assistance in leaving the ship,” and she did not submit any 

evidence to prove otherwise. On appeal, we determine whether the district judge 

properly excluded Rider’s expert opinion and granted summary judgment to 

Carnival. 

II. DISCUSSION

A. Expert Testimony

“We review for abuse of discretion the district court’s decisions regarding 

the admissibility of expert testimony and the reliability of an expert opinion.” 

United States v. Frazier, 387 F.3d 1244, 1258 (11th Cir. 2004) (en banc). Under 

Federal Rule of Evidence 702, district judges “perform the critical ‘gatekeeping’ 

function concerning the admissibility of expert scientific evidence,” id. at 1260 

(citing Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharm., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 589 n.7, 597, 113 S. 

Ct. 2786, 2795 n.7, 2798 (1993)), as well as “technical expert evidence,” id. (citing 

Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137, 147, 119 S. Ct. 1167, 1174 (1999)). 

“[I]n determining the admissibility of expert testimony under Rule 702, we engage 

in a rigorous three-part inquiry”: (1) the expert must be “qualified to testify

competently” concerning the subject matter he addresses, (2) the expert’s 

methodology must be “sufficiently reliable,” and (3) the expert’s testimony must 

“assist[] the trier of fact” in understanding scientific or technical evidence. Id. at 

1260. “The proponent of expert testimony always bears the burden to show that 

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his expert is qualified to testify competently regarding the matters he intended to 

address; the methodology by which the expert reached his conclusions is 

sufficiently reliable; and the testimony assists the trier of fact.” Id. (citation, 

internal quotation marks, and alterations omitted). The determinations of a district 

judge concerning the reliability and helpfulness of expert testimony are accorded 

“‘considerable leeway’ . . . ‘unless [they are] manifestly erroneous.’” See 

Chapman v. Procter & Gamble Distrib., LLC, 766 F.3d 1296, 1305 (11th Cir. 

2014), cert. denied, 135 S. Ct. 2312 (May 18, 2015) (quoting Kumho Tire Co., 526 

U.S. at 152, 119 S. Ct. at 1176; Rink v. Cheminova, Inc., 400 F.3d 1286, 1291 

(11th Cir. 2005)).

The district judge reasonably determined Rider’s conclusions were not 

reliable. Rider relied on new exemplar carpets to estimate the thickness of the 

subject carpet; based on photographs of the ramp, he estimated its leading edge 

was too high from the ground and needed beveling; and the guidelines he had used 

to determine appropriate carpet thickness and vertical elevation governed disabled 

persons and land-based buildings and facilities, not cruise ships. See Muncie 

Aviation Corp. v. Party Doll Fleet, Inc., 519 F.2d 1178, 1180 (5th Cir. 1975) 

(“Evidence of custom within a particular industry, group, or organization is 

admissible as bearing on the standard of care in determining negligence.”). Rider 

could not quantify the difference in the indoor and outdoor light, and he conceded 

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the photographs on which he had based his determination did not portray the 

subject lighting conditions accurately. Significantly, Rider’s conclusion regarding 

the lighting was misleading, because it was based on speculation and was 

irreconcilable with Torres’s testimony the lighting did not affect her vision. 

The judge also reasonably determined Rider’s testimony would not be 

helpful to the jury. Rider’s testimony regarding walking and the efficacy of 

different types of warnings can be understood easily and evaluated by jurors. See

Evans v. Mathis Funeral Home, Inc., 996 F.2d 266, 268 (11th Cir. 1993)

(affirming exclusion of expert testimony regarding the causes of plaintiffappellant’s fall, because they were “within the common knowledge of the jurors, 

and thus the probative value of such testimony was outweighed by the danger of 

prejudice” (citing Federal Rule of Evidence 403)). Rider additionally could not 

assist the jury in determining what caused Torres to trip; he had disregarded 

Torres’s admission about failing to pay attention or her representation she had 

tripped on the declining side of the disembarking ramp. Torres argues the 

problems in Rider’s testimony affected its weight and persuasiveness, but the 

problems reveal Rider’s testimony is unreliable, confusing, and unhelpful. Cf.

Rosenfeld v. Oceania Cruises, Inc., 654 F.3d 1190, 1193-94 (11th Cir. 2011). The 

district judge appropriately granted Carnival’s motion to exclude Rider’s 

testimony.

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B. Summary Judgment

 We review an order granting summary judgment de novo. Chapman, 766 

F.3d at 1312. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56(c), summary judgment is

mandated against a party failing to establish the existence of an element essential 

to its case and on which it bears the burden of proof at trial. Optimum Techs., Inc. 

v. Henkel Consumer Adhesives, Inc., 496 F.3d 1231, 1241 (11th Cir. 2007) 

(affirming summary judgment). Summary judgment is proper when the record 

shows there is “no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is 

entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a).

A cruise-ship owner owes an injured passenger “the duty of exercising 

reasonable care under the circumstances of each case.” Kermarec v. Compagnie 

Generale Transatlantique, 358 U.S. 625, 632, 79 S. Ct. 406, 410 (1959). To

prevail on her negligence complaint, Torres had to prove Carnival owed her a duty 

of “ordinary reasonable care under the circumstances” that it had breached by 

creating a dangerous condition of which it was actually or constructively aware, 

Keefe v. Bahama Cruise Line, Inc., 867 F.2d 1318, 1322 (11th Cir. 1989), and of 

which it had failed to warn Torres under reasonable foreseeability, Daigle v. Point 

Landing, Inc., 616 F.2d 825, 827 (5th Cir. 1980). Aside from Rider’s testimony, 

Torres failed to submit any evidence the carpet was hazardous. Testimony from 

Torres’s husband, Stark, and Komarova established the carpet was not defective.

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The undisputed evidence further established there had not been any other 

accidents on the threshold ramp, which would have put Carnival on notice the 

carpet was dangerous. See Keefe, 867 F.2d at 1322. Carnival could not be liable 

for failing to warn Torres, because “[l]iability for a failure to warn . . . arises from 

foreseeability, or the knowledge that particular conduct will create danger.”

Daigle, 616 F.2d at 827. Torres observed a “rise in the floor” and a “mat” 

consisting of “dark carpet” in her path, yet failed to pay any attention to them. 

Although Torres incurred injuries on a Carnival cruise ship, in the absence of any 

evidence to create a genuine dispute her accident was attributable to any 

negligence by Carnival, the district judge correctly granted summary judgment to 

Carnival.

AFFIRMED.

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