D manufactured a paper shredder and belt conveyor system used in the recycling of waste paper. There were no mechanical guards on the nip points at the rollers. P was an employee of Western Paper Stock Company, the owner of the machine. His employer instructed him to remove some paper wedged in a nip point in the conveyor. P attempted to comply, and his arm was pulled into the nip point where the flat belt passed over the roller and was torn off. P claimed the machine was defective and unreasonably dangerous because it was designed and distributed without safety guards, which would have prevented the injury. P sued D in negligence and strict liability for the alleged design defect. The court gave a single instruction to cover both of P's theories. P claims that the instruction given effectively deprived him of his strict liability, design defect claim. He also argues that the separate instructions which he offered correctly embodied both the traditional approach to strict liability and the proper wording for negligence cases. The court of appeals correctly noted that the 'adequacy and propriety of [the] instructions [given] revolve around the holding in Brady v. Melody Homes Manufacturer. If the product fails to perform as safely as an ordinary consumer would expect, then the manufacturer is liable under a strict liability standard. In addition, negligence is a possible theory of recovery if the issue is whether the manufacturer could have feasibly made the product safer. The court's decision was that under Brady, negligence principles are dispositive and strict liability concepts are inapplicable when a plaintiff claims that a product design was improper and that the manufacturer should have adopted an alternative design. Thus, the ultimate conclusion was that the trial judge had not erred in giving a jury instruction combining strict liability and negligence into a single theory. P appealed, contending that Brady improperly merged strict liability and negligence theories in design defect cases.

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