Opinion ID: 1692921
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Application of Review Standard by Court of Appeal

Text: Application of the foregoing principles to the conflicting expert testimony and other evidence lays bare the Court of Appeal's error in its employment of the manifest errorclearly wrong standard. The appeals court improperly conducted what amounted to a de novo finding of fact when it disregarded portions of the testimony by the plaintiff's experts and concluded that the jury was manifestly erroneous in rejecting part of the testimony of the defendant's expert. The Court of Appeal concluded that the plaintiff had failed to prove that the defective blanket caused his lung damage essentially for the same reasons advanced by Mr. Buck, the defendant's textile fire safety engineer. Basically, Mr. Buck testified that the acrylic blanket, upon combustion, would produce toxic hydrogen cyanide gas, which had been ruled out by plaintiff's medical expert as a cause of Lirette's kind of lung damage, but that the blanket, unlike other articles in the living room, could not produce isocyanate gas, which plaintiff's physician had identified as a likely cause of that type of lung disorder. On the other hand, the plaintiff's experts testified that the blanket could produce hydrogen cyanide gas and its derivatives, that isocyanate gas was a hydrogen cyanide derivative, that Lirette's lung damage could result from isocyanate gas or other such hydrogen cyanide derivatives, that Lirette's type of lower air passage damage was not usually experienced by firemen and victims of fires, and that, in scientific testing, material like that in the foreign-manufactured blanket produced an extraordinarily large volume of toxic gases. Doctor Bernard Brach, Lirette's treating physician, a doctor of medicine specializing in lung disease, was called as a witness for the plaintiff. He testified that in the fire Lirette had suffered permanent damage to his lower air passages; that Lirette had developed tracheomalacia or a softening of these airways which caused them to totally close down when he attempted to blow out; that Lirette had permanently lost 35% of his lung power; that his lungs now behaved as those of a 60 year old instead of those of a 22 year old man such as Lirette. Dr. Brach said that he had treated a couple of dozen people who were caught in fires, including firemen and severe fire victims, and that none of these patients had sustained the unusual damage to their lower air passages that Lirette had experienced. In assessing the causative factors, Dr. Brach testified that the heat of the fire had not caused Lirette's permanent injury because heat damage is usually dissipated in the upper airways and does not affect the lower air passages. He indicated that the chemical damage or reaction in Lirette's lower lung branches was caused by a toxic or noxious fume capable of penetrating through all the 23 branching passages down to the alveolar sac. Dr. Brach's testimony on this point, which is set forth in the margin, [1] is not free from ambiguity. But he several times stated that, while hydrogen cyanide gases produced by the fire had not caused Lirette's airway disorder, derivatives of hydrogen cyanide probably contributed to the damage. On cross examination, the doctor said that he could find nothing in medical literature that says hydrogen cyanide gas causes airway obstruction, but he testified that isocyanates, a group of derivatives of hydrogen cyanide has been more well [sic] described to be associated with airways disease. Mr. George Pappas, was called as an expert witness in chemical engineering by the plaintiff and accepted as so qualified by the court. Mr. Pappas had performed chemical tests on portions of a blanket [2] identical to the one in question to determine its chemical makeup. He testified that the blanket consisted of acrylic fibers made by polyacrylnitrile. Mr. Pappas further testified that in the chemical test he performed, the material from the blanket, upon combustion, produced both hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen cyanide derivatives. Doctor Otha John Jacobus, a chemist and professor of chemistry at Tulane University who had received a Ph.D. in chemistry, was called as an expert in chemistry by the plaintiff and accepted by the court. Dr. Jacobus had performed chemical tests on material taken from the identical blanket. He testified that the blanket was made 60% acrylonitrile and 40% acrylic esther. He said that when materials of this type are cooked with heat, but without a fire, they decompose and that one of their major decomposition products is hydrogen cyanide. From a test in which he heated a portion of the blanket's material in a test tube, Doctor Jacobus concluded that the blanket was capable of producing a tremedous load of cyanide in a lethal concentration. He stated that the makeup of the blanket was somewhat strange in that, once ignited, it continued to burn, whereas a blanket made of wool or 100% acrylonitrile is self-extinguishing and will not continue to burn once it is ignited. Dr. Jacobus testified that there are literally hundreds of different acrylics and that unless one analyzes a particular acrylic and determines that it contains acrylonitrile there is no way of knowing that it can produce cyanide. From our review of the record, we conclude that the jury's decision to credit the testimony of the plaintiff's experts and to reject, in part, the testimony of Mr. Buck, the defendant's expert, was not manifestly erroneous or clearly wrong. The testimony and the reasoning of the plaintiff's experts were not patently unsound. The jury reasonably could have concluded that the defective foreign-manufactured blanket, when baked or burned, produced especially toxic fumes, consisting of both hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen cyanide derivatives, and that the hydrogen cyanide derivatives caused the rare type of chemical damage to Lirette's lower air passages that is not usually encountered in fire victim patients. Insofar as it was inconsistent with this evidence, the jury also reasonably could have rejected the testimony of Mr. Buck, the defendant's only expert, as being less credible. Consequently, the error of the Court of Appeal was its failure to give due regard to the ability of the jury to interpret and discern the credibility of oral testimony. Because of this lapse, the Court of Appeal compounded its error by failing to recognize that there were two permissible views of the evidence and that, when this is so, the factfinder's choice between them cannot be manifestly erroneous or clearly wrong. Sistler, supra; Rosell, supra. Defendants also argue that the jury was clearly wrong or manifestly erroneous in finding causation because all of the experts testified that other household items would emit toxic gases upon combustion, and consequently, plaintiff did not prove the toxic gases produced by this particular blanket were the cause of the injury. We disagree. Dr. Brach testified that he had treated numerous victims of household fires, none of whom suffered plaintiff's peculiar injuries. Dr. Jacobus and Mr. Pappas added that this particular blanket was capable of producing a high concentration of lethal gases, which according to Mr. Pappas was not typical of ordinary household items. The jury could have reasonably interpreted this testimony as indicating that the blanket and not other household items caused plaintiff's injury. Any contrary testimony by Mr. Buck could have also been reasonably discredited by the jury, as the choice between the testimony of the experts was for the jury to make. When a court of appeal has not had the opportunity, or has found it unnecessary to review the merits of the controversy, this court's usual practice, when it becomes necessary to set aside an appeals court's reversal of a trial court judgment, is to remand the case to the court of appeal, even though this court is empowered to dispose of the case finally on writ review. Rosell, supra; Levi v. SLEMCO, 542 So.2d 1081 (La.1989); Richards v. Richards, 408 So.2d 1209 (La.1981); Kavanaugh v. Berkett, 407 So.2d 645 (La.1981). Accordingly, we will reverse the Court of Appeal judgment, but remand the case to the Court of Appeal for it to review the issues not addressed because of its disposition on the sole issue of causation.