UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT 

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MIRIAM WHITE, 

 Plaintiff - Appellant, 

v. 

DEERE & COMPANY, 

 Defendant - Appellee. 

No. 16-1098 

(D.C. No. 1:13-CV-02173-PAB-NYW) 

(D. Colo.) 

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ORDER AND JUDGMENT*

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Before KELLY, GORSUCH, and MATHESON, Circuit Judges. 

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After a bale of hay hit and injured Miriam White while she was operating her 

tractor, she sued the manufacturer, Deere & Company. At the trial that followed the 

jury returned a verdict for Deere. Ms. White now appeals this judgment, but we 

discern no reversible error. 

Ms. White first claims the district court erred by instructing the jury that it 

could presume Deere’s product free from defect. Usually, Colorado law requires just 

such an instruction where (as here) the product at issue has been on the market for ten 

 *

 After examining the briefs and appellate record, this panel has determined 

unanimously that oral argument would not materially assist in the determination of 

this appeal. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a)(2); 10th Cir. R. 34.1(G). The case is therefore 

ordered submitted without oral argument. This order and judgment is not binding 

precedent, except under the doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral 

estoppel. It may be cited, however, for its persuasive value consistent with 

Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 and 10th Cir. R. 32.1. 

FILED 

United States Court of Appeals

Tenth Circuit 

November 29, 2016

Elisabeth A. Shumaker 

Clerk of Court
2 

years. See Colo. Rev. Stat. § 13-21-403(3)-(4). But Ms. White says Colorado courts 

have created an exception to this rule for products that have been subject to previous 

product liability suits. Deere disagrees with this assessment and says a statutory 

amendment abrogated any such judicially crafted exception. For our part, we don’t 

have to tangle with the parties’ legal dispute, though, because the record before us 

offers no evidence that the Deere equipment has been subject to any previous defect 

claim. True, in a pre-trial motion Ms. White sought to identify such a claim. But the 

district court granted a motion in limine excluding this evidence, Ms. White has not 

appealed that ruling, and so it is we are left without any record evidence of any prior 

claim. And given that and whatever the state of Colorado law may be, we cannot say 

the district court erred. 

 Ms. White next claims that, when the district court instructed the jury about 

the ten-year presumption, it failed to explain that the presumption was “rebuttabl[e].” 

But Ms. White didn’t raise this objection at trial, so we may review the district 

court’s instruction for plain error only. And that much we do not see. The district 

court’s jury instruction was almost identical to the Colorado pattern jury instruction. 

And, at least implicitly, it conveyed the concept that the presumption was rebuttable: 

after all, by definition and in ordinary usage presumptions are usually (if not always) 

thought to be just (and only) that. See 12 Oxford English Dictionary 428-29 (2d ed. 

1989) (defining “presumption” to mean, among other things, an assumption, 

expectation or supposition). Neither does anyone doubt that Ms. White was free to 

argue exactly this much to the jury. So while the pattern jury instruction could 
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perhaps be more punctilious, and while we offer no view of how we’d rule de novo, 

we cannot say the district court plainly erred in offering the instruction it did. 

 Finally, Ms. White claims the district court wrongly excluded a particular 

version of an operator’s manual for the Deere equipment, one written after the 

accident in this case. But Ms. White herself seems to concede that this manual’s only 

relevance or utility was to rebut Deere’s affirmative defenses. And at trial the jury 

never got that far, for it found Ms. White failed to carry her prima facie case. So it is 

any conceivable error on this point could have been no more than harmless. See 

Allen v. Minnstar, Inc., 97 F.3d 1365, 1369 (10th Cir. 1996). 

 Affirmed. 

Entered for the Court 

Neil M. Gorsuch 

Circuit Judge