Opinion ID: 1481786
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: Sequence of Negligence and Cause

Text: We have seen that Bethlehem's failure to warn was not a superseding cause as a matter of law. We have also seen that the possibility of heedlessness on the decedents' parts is not, as a matter of law, a superseding cause. Now, Eagle presents the ultimate causation argument  that there came a time when the decedents would have died from mesothelioma in any event, even if Eagle thereafter gave warnings. Eagle's theory here is that once the decedents' diseases became terminal, any continuing duty of Eagle to warn could not operate as a cause, so that state of the art evidence after that date is irrelevant. From the standpoint of preservation for appellate review, the vehicle for Eagle's argument is the denial of a requested instruction limiting the jury's use of state of the art evidence. [15] During trial, the court instructed the jury not to consider the state of the art after 1944 in determining the defendants' liability to Balbos. At the conclusion of the evidence the court declined to give the following instruction: In determining whether any defendant breached [a] duty to warn you must consider what a reasonable manufacturer or supplier of a particular asbestos product should have provided in terms of warnings and precautions in view of the hazard at and before the time of the plaintiffs' last mesothelioma-producing asbestos exposure. Eagle argues that the above instruction should have been given in both Balbos and Knuckles. There was no reversible error. At first blush the requested instruction appears to do no more than what the court had instructed during trial, namely, that the jury should not consider state of the art evidence after the employee's exposure to asbestos had terminated by leaving shipyard employment. Eagle now emphasizes the words, last mesothelioma-producing asbestos exposure, in the requested instruction and reads much more into it. Eagle says that the jury could work backwards from the date of each decedent's death, or from the date when mesothelioma was first diagnosed in each decedent, to a date of onset of that decedent's mesothelioma. This onset date can be computed, Eagle says, from the expert witnesses' virtual consensus on the latency period of the disease. Brief of Petitioner Eagle at 32. Further, Eagle argues that there was no evidence that there is any beneficial treatment for mesothelioma. Consequently, Eagle submits, it could not have any duty to warn that continued after the onset date, thus rendering irrelevant any post-onset state of the art evidence. Because such evidence was admitted and its consideration on the issue of negligence was not limited, Eagle submits that it was prejudiced. The short answer is that the requested instruction is defective because the words, last mesothelioma-producing asbestos exposure, do not adequately convey to the jurors what Eagle wanted the jurors to do. There was conflicting evidence on the length of the latency period. An expert called by the plaintiffs testified that the average was thirty to forty years, and the minimum was about fifteen years, although a seven-year latency period had been reported. That same expert also testified that time was not the only factor. The two components that have been formulated as being significant in helping to explain how mesothelioma develops in its relationship to asbestos are, number one, there appears to be a linear relationship to the dose, to the burden that is in the lung, and number two that there is a relationship that is really geometric and depends on the length of time since the first exposure. That appears to be the more powerful of the two associations. A second plaintiffs' expert testified that twenty years was the normal minimum latency but that [w]e can see them at nine and thirteen years but they're not common. A third expert, called by the defendants, testified that any asbestos exposure Knuckles suffered during the twenty years prior to his diagnosis in 1984 probably would not have been responsible for the development of the mesothelioma that killed Knuckles. The requested instruction does not advise the jury to resolve that factual conflict about the length of the latency period and then to convert it to an onset date in order to exclude from consideration state of the art after the onset date. In addition, the court properly instructed the jury that the defendants' negligent conduct had to cause the plaintiffs' injuries. These instructions did not preclude the defendants from arguing that the state of the art during Knuckles's latency should not be considered, and counsel for one of the defendants did exactly that. The trial court did not abuse its discretion in giving only a general instruction within which defendants could make their argument on this complex issue. See Aronstamn v. Coffey, 259 Md. 47, 51, 267 A.2d 741, 743 (1970) (not reversible error to refuse to give specific instructions where the instructions as given were broad enough to permit counsel to fit proper arguments within them).