This column surveys three recent developments of interest. The pith and substance of each is presented and the interested reader can take it from there, pursuing the many factual details at each source. In the Eleventh Circuit’s Hughes decision, the opinion of a plaintiff’s crash injury causation expert, Dr. Joseph L. Burton, was deemed “unreliable” and excluded under Daubert1 and Federal Evidence Rule 702. In the Eleventh Circuit’s Chapman decision, four experts’ opinions that plaintiff’s zinc-induced copper-deficiency myelopathy (CDM) was caused by using Fixodent denture adhesive were excluded because they were unreliable. In the Young v. Lacy decision by New York’s Appellate Division (Fourth Department), a defendant’s attorney in a motor vehicle accident case should have been allowed to question plaintiff regarding possible tax fraud in her tax returns.
In Hughes v. Kia Motors Corp.,2 a Kia Optima vehicle collided with a Mack truck. The impact caused the Kia to “pinball about,” colliding with two parked cars, a fence, a tree, three metal posts supporting a carport awning and a flagpole before coming to rest against a house. The driver died from a brain injury. Her mother sued on a variety of products liability theories. A major claim was that the Optima should have had a fuel flow shut-off switch that, according to plaintiff’s theory, would have prevented the vehicle from engaging in the multiple collisions. Other claims concerned alleged defects in the airbag deployment system and failure to warn.
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