Fusco v. General Motors Corporation

11 F.3d 259 (1st Cir. 1993)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

Fusco (P) was driving her car, a Chevrolet Chevette, when it suddenly left the roadway, slid across an ice-covered embankment, and hit a telephone pole. P sued D claiming that a key component in the steering system--the front left 'ball stud'--had broken from metal fatigue and caused the disaster. D removed the case to federal court and claimed that the part had fractured when the car hit the telephone pole. A jury trial resulted in an evenly divided hung jury, and the district court promptly ordered a second trial. P offered eyewitness testimony that her car had abruptly veered off the highway and collided with a telephone pole. A state trooper testified that the car was resting against the pole near the hinge pillar on the driver's side, a location between the door and the left front fender. Fusco offered two experts (Robert Walson and Carl Thelin) who concluded that metal fatigue had caused the stud to break, causing the steering apparatus to fail and the car to veer into the pole. In essence, the surface of the broken ball stud was characteristic of a fatigue, rather than an impact, fracture. Thelin, an automotive engineer, testified that D's design and quality control of the ball stud were inadequate. D's expert reconstructed the accident and testified that had the stud broken before the car veered there would have been a heavy black tire mark on the road because the uncontrolled tire would have dragged as the car slid off course. Other experts refuted P's expert testimony. For the first trial, D had created two video re-creations of the accident where a car was rigged to have the same defect that P was claiming. The rigged car reacted differently than P’s. When D produced the tapes to P, P made a motion in limine to exclude them, arguing that the test track conditions did not duplicate the conditions that existed at the time of the actual accident. The trial court ruled that the videos were inadmissible in the first trial. D did not seek to offer the tapes at the second trial. The jury awarded P $ 1 million in damages. D appealed.