Title: Tittsworth v. Robinson
Citation: N/A
Docket Number: 951742
State: Virginia
Issuer: Virginia Supreme Court
Date: September 13, 1996

Present:  All the Justices 
 
JEFFREY A. TITTSWORTH 
 
OPINION BY JUSTICE ROSCOE B. STEPHENSON, JR. 
v.  Record No. 951742 
                                  September 13, 1996 
STEPHANIE N. ROBINSON 
 
 
FROM THE CIRCUIT COURT OF STAFFORD COUNTY 
 
Carleton Penn, Judge Designate 
 
 
The sole issue in this appeal is whether the trial court 
erred in allowing certain expert testimony. 
 
Jeffrey A. Tittsworth filed a motion for judgment against 
Stephanie N. Robinson seeking damages for personal injuries he 
sustained in a motor vehicle collision.  The case was tried to a 
jury which returned a verdict in favor of Robinson.  The trial 
court entered judgment on the verdict, and this appeal ensued. 
 
At the time of the accident, Tittsworth, operating his Mazda 
van, was leaving a parking lot adjoining Highway Route 610 in 
Stafford County.  While stopped at the lot's exit and waiting for 
traffic on the highway to clear, a Hyundai automobile operated by 
Robinson struck the rear of the Mazda. 
 
Rain had been falling that day, and the soles of Robinson's 
tennis shoes were wet.  Robinson's car struck the rear of 
Tittsworth's van when, as Robinson leaned over to move some 
curling irons from the front passenger seat to the floor of her 
car, her foot slipped off the clutch pedal.  
 
At the accident scene, Tittsworth told Robinson that he had 
not been injured.  However, several hours after the collision, 
Tittsworth began to experience stiffness in his back which became 
painful and progressively worse, and, two days later, he saw a 
 
 
 
 
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physician.  After undergoing a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) 
scan of the lumbar spine, Tittsworth was referred to Dr. Donald 
G. Hope, a neurosurgeon. 
 
Dr. Hope found that Tittsworth had a herniated disk at the 
"L5-S1 level."  Based upon Tittsworth's medical history, the 
doctor concluded that the herniated disk in Tittsworth's lumbar 
spine resulted from the collision. 
 
Robinson presented two expert witnesses in an effort to 
prove that the collision could not have caused Tittsworth's disk 
to rupture.  Alfred L. Cipriani was qualified as an expert in the 
field of mechanical engineering and gravity acceleration impact 
analysis.  Dr. Peter H. Abbrecht was qualified as an expert in 
biomedical engineering and biomechanics. 
 
Cipriani testified that so-called "G force" is the 
acceleration of gravity, which, he explained, accelerates at 32.2 
feet per second, constituting one G.  Cipriani concluded that the 
force experienced by Tittsworth in the collision was not greater 
than 1.6 G's and that such force is less than many people 
experience in daily activities.
1
 
Cipriani then explained how he reached his conclusion.  He 
first obtained the identification numbers of the two vehicles 
involved in the collision.  From these numbers, he ascertained 
the make, model, and year of each vehicle.  With this 
 
     
1Cipriani testified that a person, in hopping off an eight-
inch step, would subject his head to as much as 8 G's and, in  
coughing, would subject his head to three and one-half G's. 
 
 
 
 
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information, he had "a data base available which provide[d] 
vehicle information such as the wheel base, the overall width, 
the weight of the car, things like that, so [he could] identify 
the vehicle more specifically."  Cipriani then "look[ed] up crash 
tests data on substantially similar cars."  These tests are 
conducted by organizations such as the National Highway 
Transportation Safety Administration, the Insurance Institute for 
Highway Safety, and Transport Canada, and they reveal how "stiff" 
a vehicle is in the front and rear.  According to Cipriani, 
"[t]he amount of crush that occurs to a vehicle for a given speed 
is dependent upon how stiff the vehicle is."  He stated that, 
having obtained all this information, he then was "ready to look 
at the photographs [of the vehicles involved in the collision] 
and to start to do an analysis." 
 
After looking at the photographs, Cipriani "assume[d] half 
of an inch of permanent crush [damage] of the whole width and 
whole height of the back of the [Mazda]."  He also "assumed a 
half of an inch of crush damage over the width of the entire 
[Hyundai]."  These assumptions, he said, gave "the benefit of the 
doubt" to Tittsworth. 
 
Cipriani, utilizing the crash test information and his 
assumptions regarding crush damage, and with the assistance of a 
computer program which he did not develop, then calculated the 
maximum force that was applied to the rear of Tittsworth's van in 
the collision.  This force, he determined, was 1.6 G's. 
 
 
 
 
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Dr. Abbrecht testified that, in his opinion, "the force of 
this accident [was] not enough to cause any injury, and . . . 
definitely not enough to cause a specific injury of herniation of 
the L5 S1 disk."  Before reaching this conclusion, Abbrecht had 
reviewed Tittsworth's medical records, including x-rays and the 
MRI scan of Tittsworth's lumbar spine, Tittsworth's deposition, 
photographs of the two vehicles, and Cipriani's analysis.  He 
based his opinion in large measure on experiments, conducted by a 
concern called Engineering Dynamics Corporation, in which human 
volunteers were exposed to 2.2 G's of force in rear-end 
collisions.  According to Abbrecht, the volunteers received no 
injuries in the experiments.  These experiments, however, were 
designed to investigate neck injuries, not lumbar injuries, and 
Abbrecht conceded that there have been no "low back" studies. 
 
Tittsworth moved the court to strike the experts' testimony. 
 He asserted, inter alia, that their testimony lacked an adequate 
foundation and a factual basis to support their opinions and that 
the experts relied upon experiments conducted under conditions 
that were not substantially similar to the conditions existing in 
the present case.  The trial court denied the motion. 
 
Generally, expert testimony is admissible in civil cases if 
it will assist the fact finder in understanding the evidence.  
Such testimony, however, must meet certain fundamental 
requirements.  See Code §§ 8.01-401.1 and -401.3; Tarmac Mid-
Atlantic, Inc. v. Smiley Block Co., 250 Va. 161, 166, 458 S.E.2d 
 
 
 
 
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462, 465-66 (1995); Lawson v. John Doe, 239 Va. 477, 482-83, 391 
S.E.2d 333, 336 (1990); Clark v. Chapman, 238 Va. 655, 664-65, 
385 S.E.2d 885, 891 (1989).  Such testimony cannot be speculative 
or founded upon assumptions that have an insufficient factual 
basis.  Tarmac Mid-Atlantic, Inc., 250 Va. at 166, 458 S.E.2d at 
466; see Gilbert v. Summers, 240 Va. 155, 159-60, 393 S.E.2d 213, 
215 (1990); Lawson, 239 Va. at 482-83, 391 S.E.2d at 336; Cassady 
v. Martin, 220 Va. 1093, 1100, 266 S.E.2d 104, 108 (1980).  Such 
testimony also is inadmissible if the expert has failed to 
consider all the variables that bear upon the inferences to be 
deduced from the facts observed.  Tarmac Mid-Atlantic, Inc., 250 
Va. at 166, 458 S.E.2d at 466; see Swiney v. Overby, 237 Va. 231, 
233-34, 377 S.E.2d 372, 374 (1989); Grasty v. Tanner, 206 Va. 
723, 727, 146 S.E.2d 252, 255 (1966).  Further, where tests are 
involved, such testimony should be excluded unless there is proof 
that the conditions existing at the time of the tests and at the 
time relevant to the facts at issue are substantially similar.  
Tarmac Mid-Atlantic, Inc., 250 Va. at 166, 458 S.E.2d at 466; 
Runyon v. Geldner, 237 Va. 460, 463-64, 377 S.E.2d 456, 458-59 
(1989). 
 
While Code §§ 8.01-401.1 and -401.3 have liberalized the 
admissibility of expert testimony, we think the experts' 
testimony here fails to meet the fundamental requirements 
enumerated above.  With respect to Cipriani, there was no showing 
that the crash tests relied upon were conducted under conditions 
 
 
 
 
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similar to those existing at the accident scene.  More 
importantly, Cipriani never examined the vehicles involved in the 
collision; rather, he relied solely upon the photographs of the 
vehicles to determine the permanent crush damage thereto.  He did 
not know whether the undercarriages of the vehicles had been 
damaged, and, if so, the extent thereof.  Indeed, Cipriani simply 
"assumed" that each vehicle sustained a crush damage of one-half 
an inch. 
 
Abbrecht relied, in part, upon Cipriani's conclusion.  He 
also relied upon the photographs of the vehicles and the rear-end 
collision experiments.  Again, there was no proof that these 
experiments were conducted under circumstances substantially 
similar to those existing at the accident scene.  Moreover, the 
tests focused upon neck injuries, not lumbar spine injuries, and 
Tittsworth sustained an injury to a disk in his lumbar spine. 
 
In sum, the challenged expert testimony is speculative, is 
founded upon assumptions lacking a sufficient factual basis, 
relies upon dissimilar tests, and contains too many disregarded 
variables.
2  Consequently, we hold that the testimony is 
unreliable as a matter of law, and, therefore, the trial court 
 
     
2Robinson contends that Tittsworth "`opened the door' to the 
biomechanical evidence and waived objections to its 
admissibility" because Tittsworth's expert, Dr. Hope, testified, 
without objection, that a lumbar disk can rupture as a result of 
"the normal biomechanical factors that a person goes through 
. . . with standing, sitting, rotating from side to side without 
any trauma."  We reject this contention.  We do not think that 
such a general statement by a medical expert opened the door to 
the speculative and unreliable testimony of Robinson's experts. 
 
 
 
 
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erred in admitting it.
3
 
Accordingly, we will reverse the trial court's judgment and 
remand the case for a new trial. 
 
Reversed and remanded. 
                     
     
3On appeal, Robinson advances a harmless-error argument in 
asserting that the jury "could have rendered its decision without 
considering the [challenged] expert evidence."  Robinson contends 
that the jury "could easily have found that [her] conduct was not 
negligent" or "could have reached its verdict based on [other] 
causation testimony."  We reject this argument because we have no 
way of determining what evidence may have influenced the jury in 
reaching its verdict.  See, e.g., Ring v. Poelman, 240 Va. 323, 
328, 397 S.E.2d 824, 827 (1990); Doe v. Thomas, 227 Va. 466, 473, 
318 S.E.2d 382, 386 (1984).