Opinion ID: 53858
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Expert Testimony Rulings

Text: We review district court rulings on the admission of expert testimony for abuse of discretion. Moore v. Ashland Chemical, Inc., 151 F.3d 269, 274 (5th Cir.1998)(en banc). 1) Expert witness for the Wrights The district judge excluded certain testimony from the Wrights' primary expert witness, Dr. Geoffrey Mahon, who was brought to testify that had the Expedition been equipped with the reverse sensing system, it would have more likely than not prevented the accident that claimed the life of Cade Wright. Specifically, the district judge excluded from evidence sanity testing [11] conducted for Mahon by The Irwin Company, an accident reconstruction company, that attempted to show that an Expedition equipped with the reverse sensing system would have detected Cade Wright and alerted Robin McCutcheon to his presence in her vehicle's blind spot. To conduct this test, Irwin located a person who owned an Expedition equipped with the reverse sensing system, traveled to their home with his three-year-old nephew, and tested the system by placing his nephew in various positions behind the Expedition to test its response. As a result of the exclusion of Irwin's tests, Mahon was not allowed to testify about the results of the tests or its role in shaping his expert opinion. According to the Wrights, this allowed Ford's attorneys to cross-examine Mahon aggressively concerning his lack of testing conducted by him personally supporting his theory that the reverse sensing system was capable of detecting a three-year-old child, creating the impression for the jury that his theory was without basis and easily disregarded. The Wrights have not provided us with a record upon which we may determine whether or not the exclusion of Irwin's tests was an abuse of discretion. Our past decisions have clearly indicated that `excluded evidence is sufficiently preserved for review when the trial court has been informed as to what counsel intends to show by the evidence and why it should be admitted, and this court has a record upon which we may adequately examine the propriety and harmfulness of the ruling.' Dell Computer Corp. v. Rodriguez, 390 F.3d 377, 387 (5th Cir.2004) (emphasis added) (quoting United States v. Jimenez, 256 F.3d 330, 343 (5th Cir.2001) (noting that [t]he latter rule has particular force when the trial court makes clear that it does not wish to hear further argument on the issue.)). The Wrights failed to include in the record to this court any documentary evidence of the tests. Irwin made no written notations of the results of his tests and reported the results of the sanity testing to Mahon over the telephone in an unrecorded conversation. The only documentation of the tests consists of a series of photographs and a home video with such poor sound quality that wind noise apparently blocked the sound of the sensors alerting to detection of objects (and a child) placed in the vehicle's blind spot. Furthermore, even if the sensors could be heard in the video, it appears that the position of the camera made it impossible to gauge distances. Alas, none of this documentary evidence was included in the appellate record for us to review ourselves to adequately examine the propriety of the trial court's ruling. The manner in which the tests were performed, as disclosed in the video documentation of the testing, which was before the district judge but has not been included in the record on appeal, left the district judge so incredulous as to state, I think my daughter's high school science fair projects are more scientific than this. . . . Indeed, after viewing the video documentation of the test, the district judge described it by saying, for example: to say I wasn't impressed is an understatement; It wasn't at all the quality experiment that I would expect; it just didn't seem to pass the scientific smell test to me; my children and I could have done this test and we could have made it look better . . . my husband could do better; the video is, in my estimate, an embarrassment to the scientific community . . . not scientific at all . . . totally unscientific; and, finally, That's not a scientific piece of documentation, in my opinion. Nothing in the record before us allows us to conclude that the district court abused its discretion in excluding the results of this testing or opinions based thereon. We affirm the district court's exclusion of Irwin's sanity testing. 2) Expert witness for Ford Ford retained expert witness Dr. Michelle Vogler to testify regarding the relative safety of the McCutcheon's 2001 Expedition in order to contest the Wrights' claims that the Expedition was unreasonably dangerous when not equipped with a reverse sensing system. The Wrights argue that the district court erred by allowing Vogler to testify regarding the blind spots of vehicles not substantially similar to the McCutcheon's Expedition, including vehicles manufactured after the vehicle in question. The Wrights contend this testimony was unfairly prejudicial and harmful, and comparing the blind spot of the McCutcheon's 2001 Expedition to those of cars manufactured in 2004 gave the jury the improper and erroneous evidence that the 2001 Expedition compared favorably with other vehicles manufactured in 2001. Vogler testified that the 2001 Expedition's rear blind spot was not unusually large when compared to many passenger cars, sold in 2001 and after. The point of the expert testimony was to present evidence that countered the Wrights' conclusory allegations that the 2001 Expedition's blind spot was unreasonably dangerous due to being unusually large. We see no abuse of discretion in the district judge's admission of this testimony, and we accordingly reject appellants' complaint in this respect.