[DO NOT PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
FILED
------------------------------------------- U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 06-11423 February 28, 2007
Non-Argument Calendar THOMAS K. KAHN
-------------------------------------------- CLERK
D.C. Docket No. 04-00438-CV-CO-W
WILLIAM C. BURKE,
deceased,
Plaintiff,
LOLA E. BURKE,
Individually and as executrix of the estate of
William C. Burke,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
versus
GENERAL MOTORS CORPORATION,
Defendant-Appellee.
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Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of Alabama
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(February 28, 2007)
Before EDMONDSON, Chief Judge, BIRCH and BLACK, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
Plaintiff-Appellant Lola Burke, executrix of the estate of William Burke,
appeals the grant of the motion in limine of Defendant-Appellee General Motors
Corporation (“GMC”) to exclude Plaintiff’s expert witnesses and the consequent
grant of summary judgment dismissing Plaintiff’s claims. No reversible error has
been shown; we affirm.
Plaintiff and her husband, William Burke, were injured when their 2002
GMC Sierra pickup crashed into a tree. Plaintiff suffered no serious injuries.
Burke suffered vertebral fractures that left him paralyzed from the neck down; he
died as a result of complications from his injuries. Plaintiff’s claims against GMC
were founded on her contention that the seatbelt and airbag systems in the Sierra
were defective and unreasonably dangerous -- the seatbelts were equipped with no
pretensioner and the airbag system was single-stage as opposed to a dual-stage
deployment system -- and that these defects were the proximate cause of Burke’s
injuries and later death. At the time of the accident, Burke was eighty years old
and suffered from ankylosing spondylitis (“AS”), an inflammatory disease that
causes the ligaments and soft tissue of the spine to harden and calcify.
In support of Plaintiff’s design defect contentions, Plaintiff sought to
introduce the testimony of two expert witnesses. The testimony of Brian Frist,
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M.D. was proffered to establish that design defects in the Sierra -- not Burke’s
preexisting condition -- caused Burke’s extensive injuries. The testimony of
Donald Phillips, P.E., an engineer with experience in the design and
implementation of passenger restraint systems, was proffered to establish that
Burke would have been protected from his devastating injuries if the Sierra had
been fitted with seatbelt pretensioners and a dual-stage airbag system.
After conducting a full-day Daubert hearing, Daubert v. Merrell Dow
Pharmaceuticals Inc., 113 S.Ct. 2786 (1993), on the admissibility of Plaintiff’s
experts’s testimony, the district court concluded that both experts were qualified to
testify competently about matters in the case but ruled that the testimony of neither
expert would assist the trier of fact. The district court determined that the
experts’s conclusion that an alternative restraint system would have deployed and
would have prevented the injuries sustained by the decedent despite Burke’s
preexisting condition was not reliably supported by the methodologies employed.
Plaintiff argues that the district court improperly focused on the experts’s
conclusions and failed to analyze properly their methodologies. We disagree.
We review a trial court’s rulings on admissibility of expert testimony under
an abuse of discretion standard. General Elec. Co. v. Joiner, 118 S.Ct. 512, 517
(1997). And binding precedent of this circuit makes abundantly clear that abuse-
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of-discretion review in the context of the admissibility of expert testimony is
deferential: “we must affirm unless we find that the district court has made a clear
error of judgment, or has applied the wrong legal standard.” United States v.
Frazier, 387 F.3d 1244, 1259 (11th Cir. 2004). The Daubert line of cases vest
district court’s with “considerable leeway” when deciding to admit or exclude
expert testimony; our review is very limited. Hall v. United Ins. Co. of America,
367 F.3d 1255, 1261 (11th Cir. 2004).
About the testimony of Dr. Frist, the district court concluded that Dr. Frist
failed to show by scientific evidence that Burke’s injuries would have been
different had the airbag deployed. Briefly stated, while Frist maintained that 37 to
50 per cent of the general population would have sustained injuries similar to
Burke’s injuries -- thus suggesting at least some possibility that Burke’s
preexisting condition was not the proximate cause of his injuries -- this data failed
to address what percentage of the general population also suffers AS and failed to
show that the failure of the restraint system impacted upon Burke’s injuries. The
methodology employed by Frist and the scientific evidence upon which he relied,
were determined to be insufficiently reliable to support the conclusions Frist
reached. As such, the district court determined that Frist’s testimony would not
assist the trier of fact.
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About the testimony of Phillips, the district court concluded that Phillips’s
methodology was flawed. In an effort to establish that the airbag in the 2003
model of the Sierra would have deployed had it been installed in Burke’s 2002
Sierra, Phillips compared GMC’s test reports on the 2003 Sierra airbag system
with data from Burke’s crash. Briefly stated, the data was not readily comparable:
Phillips phase-shifted the data to eliminate the first 40 milliseconds of data from
the actual crash. The district court determined that this deletion of data
undermined the reliability of his testimony. The district court questioned
Phillips’s methodology (which, although being capable of being tested was not so
tested) and questioned also whether the methodology employed itself undermined
Phillips’s conclusion. As such, Phillips’s testimony would not assist the trier of
fact in resolving whether the alternative airbag design would have deployed and
whether it would have prevented Burke’s injuries.
Under the deferential standard of review applicable to the district court’s
exercise of discretion, we see no reversible error. The district court painstakingly
analyzed the proffered experts methodologies and the correspondence between the
scientific evidence upon which the experts relied and the conclusions about which
they would opine. Plaintiff shows us neither clear error in judgment nor a legal
standard applied wrongly. Plaintiff’s protestations to the contrary
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notwithstanding, the district court performed its gatekeeping function -- as
Daubert and its progeny requires -- “to insure that speculative and unreliable
opinions do not reach the jury.” McClain v. Metabolife International, Inc., 401
F.3d 1233, 1237 (11th Cir. 2005). The district court committed no abuse of
discretion when it concluded that Plaintiff, as proponent of the testimony, failed to
carry its burden of establishing the reliability of their experts’s opinions. See id. at
1238 n.2.
AFFIRMED.
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