Opinion ID: 781942
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Military Specifications

Text: 15 The district court did not abuse its discretion in granting McEuin's pretrial motion to exclude the introduction of military specifications as irrelevant, thus inadmissable under Rule 402 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, to prove that the lack of a door on a forklift is not unreasonably dangerous. Crown sought to introduce the military specifications to demonstrate that the 30RC conformed with military standards, influenced the design of the 30RC, and supported its contention that a door is unreasonably dangerous. McEuin correctly argued that the military design specifications should be excluded because the 30RC has no application in any military setting and because military standards have no relevance in a strict liability claim where the focus is on the question of whether the product was in unreasonably dangerous condition at the time of sale. See OR. REV. STAT. § 30.920. 16 The district court also considered whether the military specifications should be admitted for the limited purpose of their relevance to the punitive damages claim. Although the military specifications may be relevant to prove the state of mind of Crown in designing the 30RC, the district court properly performed the 403 balancing test in determining not to admit the military specifications. See FED. R. EVID. 403(stating that relevant evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion, or undue delay). The court stated that excluding the military specifications would not preclude the designer from testifying that he was aware of and may have relied on a military standard, without going into what the military standard is or was. Crown design engineer, Dan Dunlap, was permitted to and did in fact testify to this effect. 17 Crown argues that the specifications should have been admitted because McEuin took advantage of their exclusion to argue before the jury that no standards required Crown to manufacture its forklifts without doors. However, neither the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) nor the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) require that forklifts be designed and manufactured without doors. See Powered Industrial Truck Operator Training, 63 Fed.Reg. 66,238 (codified at 29 C.F.R. §§ 1910, 1915, 1917, 1918, and 1926) (1998). ANSI, acting through subcommittee, promulgates standards for industrial vehicles operated in the private sector. The relevant ANSI standards provide: 18 Operator protection [] shall be designed so as not to interfere with the normal operation of the controls, to allow getting on and off the truck easily, and to permit rapid exit in an emergency. 19 ANSI B56.1 Safety Standards § 7.28.3 (1990). Moreover, [o]perator enclosures may be provided in conjunction with the platform. If provided, they shall permit easy ingress and egress from the platform. Id. § 7.34. Thus, ANSI regulations specifically note that doors may enclose the operator cabin. The military specifications at issue, not having the force of law, could not have required Crown to manufacture its non-military 30RC forklifts to any particular specification. 20 Crown argues on appeal that the military specifications themselves are directly relevant to Crown's state of mind and, therefore, should have been admitted for the purpose of challenging McEuin's claim for punitive damages. Under Oregon law, a claim for punitive damages must be proved by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant has acted with malice or has shown a reckless and outrageous indifference to a highly unreasonable risk of harm and has acted with a conscious indifference to the health, safety and welfare of others. OR. REV. STAT. § 18.537(1). Punitive damages are interpreted by the Oregon Supreme Court as a penalty for conduct that is culpable by reason of motive, intent or extraordinary disregard of or indifference to known or highly probable risks to others. Andor v. United Air Lines, Inc., 303 Or. 505, 739 P.2d 18, 25 (1987); see also DeMendoza v. Huffman, 334 Or. 425, 51 P.3d 1232, 1242-43 (2002). 21 The court's qualification to its ruling, that defense witnesses would be permitted to testify to defendant's awareness of and reliance upon military specifications, speaks directly to the state of mind consideration. The court stated that it would permit Crown design engineers to testify as to their state of mind in considering military specifications while developing the 30RC without allowing them to introduce the contents of those specifications. Although the court did not explicitly refer to FED. R. EVID. 403 (Rule 403), it seems likely that the court was concerned about the prejudicial effect of introducing the specifications themselves. Military specifications would appear to carry the imprimatur of government sanction, and might therefore resemble in the jury's mind something akin to an actual regulation. In addition, both the legal effect and the genesis of these specifications might have been put at issue by introducing the specifications themselves, resulting in confusion of the issues for the jury as well as in an unnecessary waste of the court's time. 22 Because the court had discretion to exclude the specifications under Rule 403, it committed no error by doing so. See, e.g., Longenecker v. Gen. Motors Corp., 594 F.2d 1283, 1286 (9th Cir.1979) (stating that [t]rial judges are better able to sense the dynamics of a trial than we can ever be, and broad discretion must be accorded them in balancing probative value against prejudice). However, even if the court erred by excluding relevant evidence without relying upon Rule 403, Crown has failed to prove prejudice. Crown engineer Dunlap was permitted to provide state of mind testimony in which he referred to the military specifications. It is not clear that knowledge of their content would have influenced the jury's decision, as the specifications do not report the government's independent investigation into the safety considerations at issue in this case. In other words, the jury could have concluded that the military specifications were motivated by price rather than safety concerns. If the jury so concluded, the fact that Crown followed those specifications would do nothing to refute McEuin's theory that Crown was motivated by profit, rather than by safety concerns.