Court Opinion

ID: 9691333
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 20:26:01.840344+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:17.020063
License: Public Domain

STUMBO, Justice,
Dissenting.
Respectfully, I must disagree with the majority opinion’s conclusion that although the feasible, alternative safer design provision in the trial court’s instruction “may have been extraneous, it was certainly not erroneous or prejudicial.” I concur fully with the Court of Appeals’ decision on this issue. KRS 411.310(2) establishes a rebut-table presumption that a product is not defective if its design and manufacture conformed to the state of the art at the time of design and manufacture. This creates a presumption, which the plaintiff must overcome to get a case to the jury. Once with the jury, the sole question is whether the product is defective. As the Court of Appeals neatly stated:
Rather than make that determination as the statute requires, the trial court here included the presumption in the jury instructions and effectively passed the determination of whether or not the presumption was overcome, a question of law, to the jury. Further, the instruction wrongly imposed a greater than normal burden on the plaintiff by requiring her to prove more than Kentucky law requires in similar cases.
136 S.W.3d at 42.
I would affirm the Court of Appeals in its remand for a new trial with a properly instructed jury.
LAMBERT, C.J., and KELLER, J., join this dissent.