For want of an expert, the lawsuit is lost: Appeals court dismisses wrongful-death case against maker of Cambridge firetruck

A federal appeals court today dismissed a suit brought against a firetruck manufacturer by the estate of a Somerville woman who was fatally struck by a hose nozzle flapping loose from the back of a Cambridge firetruck as she waited for it to pass in 2010.

The US Court of Appeals for the First District in Boston agreed with a lower-court judge that Gertrude King's estate could not make its case before a jury because it did not secure any experts to discuss the design of the truck and how that might have been a fatal design flaw that led to her death.

The judge had agreed with Pierce Manufacturing to toss the case on that basis, because Massachusetts law, which governed in the case, basically requires experts to walk a jury through the technical aspects of a case. And the appeals court in turn agreed with the judge:

While a fire truck is certainly a common sight on city streets, lay knowledge does not extend to the design of the vehicle's hose bed and the relative propriety of different types of hose restraints. As the Massachusetts Appeals Court has observed in relation to an escalator, "[b]y its nature, [a fire truck] is a complex, technical piece of machinery, whose design and operational requirements are not straightforward. Accordingly, any determination of the dimensions essential to its safe operation is generally beyond the scope of an average person's knowledge." ...

Unlike in cases involving defects so obvious as to not require expert testimony, jurors here cannot be expected to intuit that a hose stored in a bed equipped with crosslay covers but not redundant hose restraints would be likely to come loose in a manner that threatens pedestrian safety.