Opinion ID: 776872
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Evidentiary Value of Sero's Theory

Text: 41 In its Daubert hearing, the district court fully analyzed Sero's proposed testimony under the factors established by the Supreme Court and found the testimony admissible. 8 The jury was entitled to consider this evidence, even if it did not conclusively demonstrate — as it need not — what specific defect caused the Aerostar's cruise control to malfunction. The district court did not strike the Daubert testimony before evaluating Ford's motion for judgment as a matter of law or recant its Daubert findings in ultimately granting that motion. Nor has Ford appealed the results of the Daubert hearing. So we need not rule on the district court's Daubert findings. However, we briefly review those findings, as they help to illustrate the role of Sero's testimony within Jarvis's case presented at trial. 42 Under the first Daubert factor, the court found that Sero has sufficiently tested and replicated the theory of two independent faults — one of the ground of the cruise control servo and another of the vent and/or vac wires. Jarvis, 1999 WL 461813, at . The court was satisfied that Sero's findings have been sufficiently verified through repeated tests on a model that accurately reflects the relevant electrical components on the 1991 Ford Aerostar. Id. The court further noted that Ford did not dispute that Sero's manipulation of the cruise control components can result in sudden, unintended acceleration, and argued only that Sero had never observed the same results in the real world. Id. Meanwhile, the court was careful to exclude another of Sero's theories that did not satisfy this first prong of the Daubert test. Id. at -5. 43 As to the second Daubert factor, the court held that even though Sero's findings had been neither published nor peer reviewed, this alone was not a sufficient reason to exclude Sero's testimony. Id. at . 9 The district court dismissed criticisms under the third Daubert factor that these theories had not been tested for their rate of error. In this regard, the court stated that Sero was not proposing to testify as to the likelihood that a malfunction in the cruise control caused [Jarvis's] accident. Rather, the court pointed out: 44 Sero is proposing to testify that the design of the 1991 Aerostar makes it physically possible for this malfunction to occur, and wishes to demonstrate to the jury how it can happen. Plaintiff presumably will seek to establish specific causation either through its accident reconstructionist or by attempting to draw inferences from the circumstantial evidence. 45 Unlike the more typical case in which an expert testifies to specific causation and uses a statistical sampling method to determine the likelihood of the event occurring in the particular case, here plaintiff's expert proposes to testify about general causation and relies on modeling and a fault analysis to demonstrate known physical and electrical principles.... 46 Defendant's dispute with Sero's ... findings lies not in their possibility, but in the likelihood that such conditions will occur in the real world..... Disputes over the conclusions that can be drawn from the results of Sero's modeling analysis is properly the province of the jury. 47 Id. at -7. 48 Turning to the fourth Daubert factor, which tests the degree to which the expert's technique has been generally accepted in the scientific community, the district court observed that Ford does not specifically challenge Sero's methodology. Id. at . Sero claimed to have used failure mode analysis on the 1991 Ford Aerostar cruise control system, a standard approach to evaluating the design of a component. Id. The district court concluded that Ford has not asserted that Sero's approach lacks support in the engineering community and we have no reason to believe such a technique is unreliable. Id. 49 The court next addressed a 1989 report prepared by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) finding that the occurrence of the two independent electrical failures, as suggested by Sero, is virtually impossible. Id. at . The court noted that the NHTSA may not have recognized that sudden acceleration could be caused, under Sero's theories, from a dead stop, and that because the court did not have further evidence as to the basis of the NHTSA's conclusions, it would not exclude Sero's testimony solely on the basis of the contrary conclusion reached by the NHTSA. Id. at . 50 The court recognized that Jarvis's inability to offer physical evidence from the accident in support of the specific defects Sero discussed could affect the weight the jury gave to these theories. The court concluded, however, that this fact did not affect the admissibility of these theories to explain the specific defect that caused Jarvis's Aerostar to accelerate because, it is basic ... to Sero's theory that there will be no physical evidence that the electrical events occurred. Jarvis, 69 F.Supp.2d at 595. 10 What weight should be given to this evidence remained for the jury to decide. 51