Opinion ID: 555441
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Excluded Testimony

Text: 12 At trial, Raymark attempted to show that DuPont did not use a lot of Raymark materials and that therefore Mr. Yohannon's exposure to Raymark asbestos-containing materials was minimal. A reasonable jury could have determined that such was not the case. Raymark presented Gregory Stagliano (Stagliano), general manager of Delaware Insulation Company, as a witness. Although he testified that the Raymark materials he delivered to DuPont amounted to less than one percent of his company's deliveries to the Plant, App. at 349-50, his company only supplied Raymark materials to DuPont from 1959 to 1966 or 1967, id. at 344. He recognized that someone else must have made the deliveries thereafter, id. at 354, and that he did not know whether other distribution companies were also supplying Raymark products to DuPont or whether DuPont purchased the products directly from Raymark, id. at 354-57. 2 In fact, Mr. Yohannon testified that he remembered a Raymark blanket that was about an inch and a half, two inches thick, ... and 28, 30 inches, somewhere in that neighborhood, wide, id. at 62, while Stagliano told the court that he never stocked any Raymark cloth of that size, nor delivered any to DuPont. Stagliano was certain that the Raymark cloth his company delivered was forty inches wide, one-sixteenth inch thick and fifty yards long and that it contained sixty to eighty percent asbestos. 13 Following Mr. Yohannon's trial testimony describing the Raymark asbestos blankets, Raymark attempted to introduce the live testimony of John Hawkins (Hawkins), a former Raymark employee. Months before trial, Hawkins videotaped a generic deposition discussing Raymark products generally and concluding that they did not emit dangerous amounts of asbestos dust. 3 The Company claims that it did not know that Mr. Yohannon would attribute to it a product it never manufactured, and therefore the videotape did not address the issue of whether Raymark ever made the asbestos blanket Mr. Yohannon described. Mr. Yohannon was deposed on October 29, 1987, eleven days before trial, and had described a Raymark blanket about one inch thick and two and one-half feet wide. Supplemental Appendix (Supp.App.) at 6-7. 14 The district court, in a pretrial order, required each party to provide a brief statement of the nature of each witness's testimony. App. at 6. In its pretrial papers, Raymark designated portions of the Hawkins videotaped deposition for use at trial and also identified Hawkins as a possible witness. At trial, the Company indicated that Hawkins was available for live testimony. Raymark did not, however, specify in its pretrial papers, or otherwise give the Yohannons notice, that Hawkins would be called to describe Raymark's particular products. When the Yohannons objected to his live testimony, the district court held a conference in chambers and decided to forbid a live presentation. It concluded that the introduction of such testimony would promote trial by ambush, and precluded the testimony as violative of [t]he Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Local Rules, the standing order concerning asbestos cases, and this court's own pretrial protocol. Id. at 664. 4 15 On appeal, Raymark contends that the district court should have allowed Hawkins to rebut Mr. Yohannon's testimony identifying the asbestos blankets as Raymark's. The Company argues that Rule 32(a)(3) favors live testimony absent unavailability of the witness or other extenuating circumstances, and that the rule does not give the district court discretion to preclude live testimony in favor of a deposition, especially since Raymark was not aware that Mr. Yohannon would testify that Raymark made this blanket until Mr. Yohannon gave his direct examination. Brief for Appellant at 17. Raymark further claims it was unable to confirm this testimony until cross-examination the next day. At that point, the Company contacted Hawkins and did notify the Yohannons that Hawkins would be called to testify. Id. In arguing that the exclusion constituted grounds for a new trial, Raymark relies on Dudley v. South Jersey Metal, Inc., 555 F.2d 96 (3d Cir.1977). 16 In Dudley, a restaurant employee injured his wrist on an allegedly defective metal table manufactured by South Jersey Metal. Plaintiff's amended complaint alleged negligence by failure to repair or warn, with an additional strict liability claim. 17 During opening statements at the trial in Dudley, counsel for South Jersey Metal told the jury that plaintiff's son cut his wrist on a bracket that supported a table extension and that the extension and bracket were subsequent modifications to the original table South Jersey Metal constructed and delivered. At the close of her case, the plaintiff requested an order pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(e) precluding South Jersey Metal from introducing evidence about the bracket. The district court granted the motion because South Jersey Metal failed to mention the bracket when it answered plaintiff's discovery interrogatories. The court found that South Jersey Metal had a duty to amend its interrogatories once it learned of the table's alteration. South Jersey Metal argued on appeal that none of its interrogatory answers was inconsistent with the defense; plaintiff simply failed to ask it about the brackets. South Jersey Metal denied deliberately misleading the plaintiff. It claimed it first learned of the alteration on a visit to the restaurant after the pre-trial conference and as plaintiff already had the blueprints for the original table, she was on notice that the extension was a subsequent modification. 18 On review, we found nothing in the record to show that South Jersey Metal deliberately misled the plaintiff. We held, therefore, that the district court's sanction was too extreme. South Jersey Metal's failure to amend its interrogatory answers was at worst a product of sheer neglect and a lack of professional courtesy. Dudley, 555 F.2d at 100. As intention to mislead was lacking and the plaintiff had constructive notice of South Jersey Metal's defense by virtue of the blueprints obtained during discovery, we held that the district court abused its discretion in barring the critical evidence. Accordingly, we reversed and remanded for a new trial. 19 Dudley is not controlling. Dudley involved a single, specific product. Since South Jersey Metal delivered the table before the extension was added, it could not be held liable on the theory that it supplied the extension. That is not true in the instant situation. Here, we deal with multiple dangerous products, some of which Raymark supplied. Raymark's own witness, Stagliano, testified that he brought Raymark asbestos products to the Plant where Mr. Yohannon worked, App. at 349-50, but he could not say that he was the sole supplier of asbestos products to DuPont, id. at 354. The record contains additional evidence placing Raymark asbestos products at the DuPont site as well. 20 The district court's action here was not an abuse of discretion. In Coleco Indus., Inc. v. Berman, 567 F.2d 569, 576 n. 14 (3d Cir.1977), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 830, 99 S.Ct. 106, 58 L.Ed.2d 124 (1978), this Court recognized two crucial factors that made the exclusion in Dudley an abuse of discretion: (1) a lack of willfulness on the part of the defendant whose evidence was excluded, and (2) a contributory neglect by the plaintiff. 21 The Yohannons were not neglectful in the case at bar. The Company simply misstates the record. Mr. Yohannon first identified the Raymark blanket in his deposition, which occurred eleven days before trial began. The Company should have announced its intention to present more than the videotaped deposition well before trial had begun. 22 Raymark should not have been surprised by Mr. Yohannon's testimony. Since he gave the Company notice at his deposition eleven days before the trial began that he would testify about a particular Raymark asbestos blanket, see Supp.App. at 6-8, the Company should have decided to call Hawkins before it did and then immediately notified the Yohannons of that intention. Raymark's failure to do so, whether attributable to conscious tactical choice or simple inadvertence, violated the rules. We therefore cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in refusing to permit Raymark to surprise the Yohannons with Hawkins's testimony on a point his videotaped deposition did not cover. 23 In fact, the Dudley decision refers approvingly to the sanctions imposed in DiGregorio v. First Rediscount Corp., 506 F.2d 781 (3d Cir.1974). DiGregorio is factually more similar to the case at bar than is Dudley. In DiGregorio, we approved the district court's dismissal of an action without a specific finding of willfulness, Dudley, 555 F.2d at 100-01, since the district court found a flagrant disregard both of the general rules of discovery and of a specific court order, DiGregorio, 506 F.2d at 788. The district court made the same finding in the instant case. See App. at 664. Since Raymark could have and should have asked to use Hawkins's live testimony earlier, in compliance with the district court's pretrial order, Raymark's Dudley argument lacks merit. Therefore, we hold the district court acted within its discretion when it decided it would be unfair to permit Raymark to call Hawkins live to rebut Mr. Yohannon's testimony. 5