Opinion ID: 429450
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Withdrawal of Rely from the Market.

Text: 31 Procter & Gamble contests the trial court's refusal to instruct the jury to consider the withdrawal of Rely from the market solely as background information. Procter & Gamble argues that the withdrawal of Rely from the market was a subsequent remedial measure which, under Rule 407 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, cannot be considered as evidence of negligence or culpable conduct. 4 The trial court denied Procter & Gamble's request for the instruction, following Eighth Circuit decisions indicating that the rationale of Rule 407 does not apply in strict liability cases, where by definition negligence is not an issue. See Farner v. Paccar, Inc., 562 F.2d 518, 528 (8th Cir.1977); Robbins v. Farmers Union Grain Terminal Assoc., 552 F.2d 788, 792-93 (8th Cir.1977). 32 Since the trial court's decision in this case, this court has refined and qualified its position that negligence-like considerations do not come into play in products liability cases. In DeLuryea v. Winthrop Laboratories, 697 F.2d 222, 227-29 (8th Cir.1983), a case involving a drug manufacturer's duty to warn users of its products and the admissibility of a subsequent change in the warning statement the manufacturer packaged with the drug, we observed that some duty-to-warn cases raise issues of reasonableness and foreseeability closely akin to those present in negligence cases. Following the Fourth Circuit's analysis in Werner v. Upjohn Co., Inc., 628 F.2d 848, 858 (1980), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 1080, 101 S.Ct. 862, 66 L.Ed.2d 804 (1981), we noted that whereas in negligence cases the inquiry focuses on the reasonableness of the defendant's conduct, in typical products liability cases the inquiry focuses not on the defendant's conduct but on the safety of the product. But where the product is inherently unavoidably unsafe, liability hinges on the adequacy of the warning to users, an issue which, like negligence in non-products cases, turns on the reasonableness of the defendant's responses to foreseeable dangers. DeLuryea, 697 F.2d at 228-29. Accordingly, we held that the rationale of Rule 407 applied with equal force under the circumstances of that case as in negligence cases, and therefore required the exclusion of evidence of subsequent changes in the drug warning leaflets. Id. at 229. 5 33 Though we agree with and will in appropriate cases follow the DeLuryea reasoning, we do not believe it requires us to reverse the trial court in this case. For this case presents a slightly different issue than DeLuryea. Unlike the DeLuryea defendant, Procter & Gamble did not argue that the trial court should altogether exclude evidence of its withdrawal of Rely from the market; instead, it introduced the evidence on its own and requested that the jury be instructed to consider the evidence only for a specific limited purpose. Thus the issue before us is not whether the trial court erroneously admitted the evidence, but whether it abused its discretion in refusing to give a limiting instruction. We think it did not. 34 Initially, we note that even assuming Procter & Gamble was entitled to a limiting instruction, it was not entitled to the instruction it requested. Its instruction would have allowed the jury to consider evidence of the withdrawal only as background information. But Rule 407 allows the admission of evidence of subsequent remedial measures when offered for any purpose other than to show negligence or culpable conduct. The advisory committee notes to Rule 407 list, among the other purposes for which such evidence is admissible, admission to show the existence of a duty, if such existence is controverted. 35 Procter & Gamble introduced evidence of the Rely market withdrawal to show the company's good faith towards the consuming public. It attempted to portray the withdrawal as wholly voluntary on its part. 6 The Kehms, on the other hand, attempted to show that Procter & Gamble withdrew Rely only after the Food and Drug Administration advised it that a soon-to-be-released CDC study showed a higher correlation between Rely and TSS than between other tampons and TSS, and after the FDA recommended that Procter & Gamble remove Rely from the market and notify users of the risks. The Kehms also introduced evidence to show that before it withdrew the product, Procter & Gamble requested that the CDC not mention Rely by name in the forthcoming study. Finally, the Kehms introduced evidence that Procter & Gamble had entered into a consent agreement with the FDA, in which it promised to withdraw Rely and inform consumers of the recent CDC study results. 36 Whether Procter & Gamble withdrew Rely voluntarily was hotly contested by the parties. At least four times during the trial, Procter & Gamble called attention to the voluntary nature of its withdrawal. Evidence relating to the withdrawal was thus admissible for purposes of impeachment, and perhaps also to show the existence or non-existence of a duty to withdraw the product. Clearly, then, Procter & Gamble was not entitled to an instruction that the jury consider the evidence for no purpose other than as an illustration of the case's background. 37 Most important, given the substantial amounts of time and testimony devoted at trial to the circumstances surrounding Rely's market withdrawal, the likelihood that a limiting instruction would have lessened the possibility of prejudice, or that the absence of such an instruction would have generated prejudice, is very small. Indeed, a limiting instruction may well have served only to confuse the issues. The withdrawal of Rely from the market is inextricably bound up with Procter & Gamble's credibility and its portrait of itself as a corporation concerned for the public's welfare. It would only obscure the issues to instruct the jury to regard the fact of withdrawal as mere background, when Procter & Gamble itself made the voluntariness of the withdrawal a part of its attempt to show that it acted responsibly during the TSS crisis. 38 Accordingly, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to give the jury instruction Procter & Gamble requested. 7 39