Court Opinion

ID: 9899796
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-11-17 18:01:48.218908+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:49.740830
License: Public Domain

NOT FOR PUBLICATION                           FILED
                    UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS                        NOV 17 2023
                                                                      MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
                                                                       U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
                           FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

TERRI FREEMAN; EARL FREEMAN,                    No.    22-56037

                Plaintiffs-Appellants,          D.C. No.
                                                2:20-cv-10661-CBM-SK
 v.

ETHICON, INC.; JOHNSON & JOHNSON, MEMORANDUM*

                Defendants-Appellees.

                   Appeal from the United States District Court
                       for the Central District of California
                  Consuelo B. Marshall, District Judge, Presiding

                    Argued and Submitted November 13, 2023
                              Pasadena, California

Before: RAWLINSON, CLIFTON, and HURWITZ, Circuit Judges.

      Plaintiffs Terri and Earl Freeman (“the Freemans”) appeal from a judgment

entered after a jury verdict in favor of Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson

(collectively “Ethicon”). The Freemans claim that the jury instructions erroneously

conflated the risks of the Prolift+M device with those posed by other Ethicon

devices not at issue in the case. Because it is unlikely that the outcome would have

      *
             This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
differed under the Freemans’ proposed instructions, we affirm.

        Erroneous instructions do not justify overturning a jury verdict if it is “more

probable than not that the jury would have reached the same verdict had it been

properly instructed.” See Dunlap v. Liberty Nat. Prods., Inc., 878 F.3d 794, 798

(9th Cir. 2017) (citation and quotations omitted). Here, any hypothetical error in

the district court’s instructions was harmless. The court’s final instructions were

almost identical to the language the Freemans suggested in their initial motion for

issue preclusion and again in the joint pretrial conference order, merely changing

the scope from “Defendants’ polypropylene mesh products (and specifically the

Prolift+M)” to “Defendants’ polypropylene mesh products (including the

Prolift+M).” Although Ethicon took advantage of the final instructions in its

closing argument, it could have made the same arguments under the Freemans’

proposal. Given the similarity of both formulations—“and specifically” and

“including”— it is unlikely that the jury would have seen much daylight between

them.

        The Freemans appear to have noticed that potential vagueness, which is why

their final proposed instructions referred solely to “Defendants’ Prolift+M.”

However, the district court’s rejection of that proposal did not preclude the

Freemans from arguing that Ethicon’s other products carry some of the enumerated

risks, but that only the Prolift+M features all of them. Indeed, the Freemans

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elicited significant testimony emphasizing the differences between the Prolift+M

and the TVT-O, another Ethicon product, and their closing argument underscored

those differences. Especially given the opaque nature of a general verdict after a

long trial, it does not appear “more probable than not” that the outcome would

have differed under a slightly different instruction.

AFFIRMED.

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