Opinion ID: 1187046
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Did the trial court err in admitting evidence of ANWC's post-accident conduct?

Text: At trial, Manville's attorneys read into the record parts of the deposition of Craig Miller, the president of ANWC. (Miller was not available to testify in person at the trial.) The following questions were among those read: Q. After the Manville incident came to your attention, did you issue any warnings to your retailers? A. There was no reason for it. Q. So you did not issue any warnings? A. No. Q. Did you issue any recalls of the Aquapedic? A. There was no reason for it. Q. So you didn't issue any recalls? A. No. ANWC objected to this testimony as being irrelevant and prejudicial. The trial court overruled the objection and allowed the testimony to be read to the jury. The theory of relevance offered by Manville was that the evidence was part of its punitive damages claim. Her contention was that ANWC's lack of post-accident remedy such as a warning or recall contributed to a showing of a pattern of callous and indifferent conduct towards that rights of others. For Manville to recover punitive damages, of course, she would have to show that that pattern extended to her. [2] If such conduct could be found to have been involved in ANWC's failure either to warn Manville of the risk of the harm that actually befell her or to recall her Aquapedic watermattress, then punitive damages would be appropriate. This is because the standard for awarding punitive damages in Alaska requires proof of reckless indifference or conscious action in deliberate disregard of the rights of others. Sturm, Ruger & Co. v. Day, 594 P.2d 38, 46 (Alaska 1979); Restatement (Second) of Torts § 908 Comment b (1979). At the point in the trial when this evidence was offered, it had already been shown that ANWC knew about the Aquapedic's leaking problem and had in fact already withdrawn it from production prior to the Manville accident. It had also been already shown that ANWC had issued no Aquapedic warnings prior to the Manville accident. Manville's theory actually uses the evidence of specific conduct after the accident, ANWC's failure to warn or recall the Aquapedic, to establish what it calls a pattern of reckless and callous disregard. That pattern is then supposed to be probative of the conduct ANWC exhibited in its failure to warn about or recall the Aquapedic before Manville's accident. The reasoning proceeds as follows: since ANWC was callous and recklessly indifferent after the accident, it is callous and recklessly indifferent in general; since ANWC is callous and recklessly indifferent in general, it was callous and recklessly indifferent before the accident. When Manville shows that she was victimized by such a state of mind, she is entitled to punitive damages. There are two problems with this theory: First, there is a significant difference between the circumstances of ANWC's pre- and post-accident conduct. Failure to warn about or recall a watermattress with a mere leak problem does not rise to callous and reckless disregard until it becomes at least reasonably foreseeable that the leak could cause injury. Manville's painful ordeal provided sufficient demonstration of the peril encountered by a possessor of a leaky Aquapedic. However, there was no evidence before the court that would support the conclusion that ANWC was on notice of this risk prior to Manville's accident. Therefore, although the evidence of subsequent reckless disregard is logically relevant towards proving ANWC's state of mind before the accident and thus admissible under Alaska Rule of Evidence 401, its probative value is substantially impaired because of the change in circumstances. Second, Manville's pattern of conduct theory really amounts to an attempt to use character evidence to prove specific conduct. That is, Manville is claiming that ANWC's pattern of callous and reckless disregard tends to show how ANWC acted before the accident with regard to Manville. This use of character evidence is in violation of both Alaska Rule of Evidence 404(a) and (b) which provide in relevant part: (a) Evidence of a person's character or a trait of his character is not admissible for the purpose of proving that he acted in conformity therewith on a particular occasion, ... ... . (b) Evidence of other ... wrongs, or acts is not admissible to prove the character of a person in order to show that he acted in conformity therewith.... Even apart from these violations, Manville's method of proving character is impermissible under Evidence Rule 405. That rule allows character to be proved, where character is admissible, generally only by reputation or opinion testimony. Here, Manville attempted to prove ANWC's character by its specific conduct of not issuing warnings and recalls after it knew of the Manville accident. Alaska Rule of Evidence 405(b) permits character to be proved by specific conduct only in cases in which character or a trait of character ... is an essential element of a ... claim. Alaska Rule of Evidence 405(b). Here, indeed, the defendant's recklessly indifferent state of mind is a character trait that is an essential element of the punitive damages claim. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 908 Comment b (1979). However, it is neither the specific character trait of ANWC's post-accident failure to remedy nor its general character trait (or pattern) of callous and reckless disregard, that is at issue in Manville's punitive damages claim. Rather, the character element essential to Manville's claim is ANWC's pre-accident recklessly indifferent state of mind involved in her underlying compensatory damages claim. Therefore, Evidence Rule 405 serves to deny Manville the opportunity to prove the character evidence which is also inadmissible for her purposes under Evidence Rule 404(a) and (b). Accordingly, it was error to admit this evidence. [3] Having concluded that there was error in admitting this evidence, we need to determine whether it was harmless. In Alaska, the rule is that an error is not harmless unless the reviewing court can say with fair assurance ... that the jury was not substantially swayed or affected by the error. Adkins v. Lester, 530 P.2d 11, 18 (Alaska 1974), reh. denied, 532 P.2d 1027 (Alaska 1975). There are three major considerations in the case which bear on this question: 1) the jury was not in fact so swayed by the erroneously admitted evidence that they awarded punitive damages against ANWC  the sole issue for which the evidence was offered; 2) the jury carefully allocated the liability three ways: ANWC  90%; the watermattress retailer  5%; Manville  5%; 3) the two post-accident conduct questions actually received relatively minor emphasis at the trial, and on review of the whole record they seem to have played a fairly innocuous role in the jury's deliberation. See Bachner v. Rich, 554 P.2d 430, 447 (Alaska 1976). Accordingly, we conclude that the erroneous admission of this evidence was harmless.