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    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. Case Brief

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    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. was a 1990 case in which 14-year-old Ashley Elliott was injured after jumping into water near a boat with an exposed propeller. Elliott sued Mercury Marine, who designed and manufactured the boat's motor. The jury found Mercury liable and awarded $4.375 million in damages. However, the appeals court reversed the judgment. The court held that (1) exposed propellers are an obvious danger to ordinary consumers, (2) while propeller guards were theoretically possible, they were not a practical alternative at the time, and (3) Mercury could not reasonably have been expected to implement an alternative design that was not fully developed and posed new safety concerns.

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    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. Case Brief

    Uploaded by

    Kevin
    50 views1 page
    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. was a 1990 case in which 14-year-old Ashley Elliott was injured after jumping into water near a boat with an exposed propeller. Elliott sued Mercury Marine, who designed and manufactured the boat's motor. The jury found Mercury liable and awarded $4.375 million in damages. However, the appeals court reversed the judgment. The court held that (1) exposed propellers are an obvious danger to ordinary consumers, (2) while propeller guards were theoretically possible, they were not a practical alternative at the time, and (3) Mercury could not reasonably have been expected to implement an alternative design that was not fully developed and posed new safety concerns.

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    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. was a 1990 case in which 14-year-old Ashley Elliott was injured after jumping into water near a boat with an exposed propeller. Elliott sued Mercury Marine, who designed and manufactured the boat's motor. The jury found Mercury liable and awarded $4.375 million in damages. However, the appeals court reversed the judgment. The court held that (1) exposed propellers are an obvious danger to ordinary consumers, (2) while propeller guards were theoretically possible, they were not a practical alternative at the time, and (3) Mercury could not reasonably have been expected to implement an alternative design that was not fully developed and posed new safety concerns.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    50 views1 page

    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. Case Brief

    Uploaded by

    Kevin
    Elliott v. Brunswick Co. was a 1990 case in which 14-year-old Ashley Elliott was injured after jumping into water near a boat with an exposed propeller. Elliott sued Mercury Marine, who designed and manufactured the boat's motor. The jury found Mercury liable and awarded $4.375 million in damages. However, the appeals court reversed the judgment. The court held that (1) exposed propellers are an obvious danger to ordinary consumers, (2) while propeller guards were theoretically possible, they were not a practical alternative at the time, and (3) Mercury could not reasonably have been expected to implement an alternative design that was not fully developed and posed new safety concerns.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 1

    Elliott v. Brunswick Co.

    Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 1990


    Senior Circuit Judge Hill:

    Facts: In July of 1982, fourteen year-old Ashley Elliott jumped from a pier into the water at night next to a boat, and the
    rotating propeller on the boat’s motor, and perhaps the boat’s cavitation plane, struck and injured her. Mercury Marine
    designed and manufactured the motor and issue, and they became the defendant in this case. In July of 1983, Elliott filed
    in the Circuit Court of Jefferson County and contended that Mercury should have constructed a guard around the boat’s
    propeller to protect her from injury. In July of 1988, Mercury and its co-defendant moved this diversity case to the United
    States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. A mistrial was declared shortly thereafter and a retrial was
    issued in July of 1989. The court instructed the jury on compensatory damages based on alleged negligence,
    compensatory damages based on the Alabama Extended Manufacturer’s Liability Doctrine, and punitive damages based
    on alleged wantonness. The jury returned a verdict in favor of Elliott for $1.5 million of compensatory damages and $3
    million of punitive damages, totaling $4.375 million after deductions from other defendants were included. Mercury
    appealed.

    Issue 1: Are a boat’s unguarded propellers dangerous beyond the expectations of the ordinary consumer?

    Issue 2: Was there an available alternative design with guarded propellers that might have prevented the injury of Elliott?

    Issue 3: Can the defendant have been reasonably expected to implement such design-changes?

    Holding 1: No

    Holding 2: Yes

    Holding 3: No

    Rationale 1: Some products, by nature, place both users and bystanders in some degree of danger. The revolving
    propellers on a boat are easily understood to be dangerous by the ordinary consumer. The court holds that the inherent
    dangers of such a product were or should have been apparent to or within the comprehension of Elliott. Thus, given the
    inherent dangers and the lack of a manufacturing defect, the unguarded propellers of the boat in question are not
    unreasonably dangerous.

    Rationale 2: From a technical standpoint, yes, there was a design of guarded propellers in the works prior to Elliott’s
    accident that might have prevented her injuries, so it was theoretically possible to equip the boat with propeller guards.
    However, an expert witness of the plaintiff, naval architect Dr. Arthur Reed, testified that this design was feasibly ten or
    eleven years of engineering research removed from being an implementable practice. Expert witnesses on both sides also
    testified that these propeller guards, in their preliminary stages at minimum, possessed many potential problems such as
    power and speed loss, steering problems, and added danger.

    Rationale 3: Given the aforementioned expert testimonies expressing the concerns with the guards from both impractical
    and dangerous standpoints, it cannot be reasonably expected that Mercury implement such changes in the current day
    and age. In addition, even the Coast Guard, who holds the safety standards for such boats, does not require or
    recommend propeller guards. In sum, it would be extremely unfair and shortsighted to burden companies with immediate
    duties to revolutionize their industries and scapegoat them for not implementing challenged designs in states of flux in
    design and development. Thus, the judgement in favor of Elliott shall be reversed.

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