Exclusion of Rifle Expert Opinion Reversed by US Appellate Court

A district court erred in finding an expert witness' causation opinion unreliable in an alleged defective rifle design case, a US appellate court has ruled.

In Seamon v. Remington Arms Co., U.S. Court of Appeals, 11th Cir. 2016, the district court had found the expert's causation opinion to be "speculative", a decision the appellate court rejected, concluding that the district court mischaracterized the opinion and the evidence supporting it.

The case stems from the death of Kenneth Seamon, who was found in his hunting tree stand with a gunshot wound to his chest, while his rifle was found on the ground, thirteen feet below, with one end of a rope wrapped around the scope and the safety. There was no gunshot residue on Seamon's body or clothing, leading to the conclusion the rifle must have been at least five to ten feet away from him when it fired.

His wife, Cynthia Seamon, the plaintiff, alleged that he died as a result of defective design in the rifle, a Remington Model 700 bolt action. Her product liability expert witness, Charles Powell, concluded that the rifle fired due to a defect in the design of its trigger system that allowed debris to keep the seer engagement from its proper safe position, the gun firing potentially by a "jar-off" (the rifle contacting something such as the ground which further jarred the seer engagement, releasing the firing pin).

The district court excluded Powell's opinion as speculative because it concluded that he had not adequately accounted for possible alternative causes and had formed his opinions based on facts not in the record. The appellate court found those conclusions "manifestly erroneous."

The appellate court determined that Powell did provide reasonable explanation for his conclusion that any alternative cause proffered by the defense "… was not the sole cause" of Seamon's gunshot wound. During his deposition, Powell was asked by Remington about its theory that the rifle fired due to a trigger pull. He answered that he did not have any evidence of that, "… the evidence is just to the contrary, that the rifle was being raised or lowered at the time it went off." (There had appeared to be no branches or anything else that could have caught the trigger between the tree stand and the ground.) The appellate court found Powell's explanation reasonable.

The district court "… conflated reasonable inference with improper speculation," the appellate court said. While it was impossible in this case to have affirmative evidence of a jar-off, the evidence available was inconsistent with Remington's theory of a trigger pull, and consistent with Powell's jar-off theory.

The appellate court noted that, even if the district court had been correct that the trigger pull theory was equally plausible to Powell's, that would be insufficient to exclude his opinion. Daubert was satisfied, even if Powell's opinion was not "… particularly strong or persuasive."

The district court had also rejected Powell's opinion as he "was unable to replicate a 'jar off' in his testing and inspection of the subject rifle." The appellate court found this erroneous as well since, at his deposition, Powell had said that he did not attempt to conduct such a test because when he received the rifle, the sear engagement was safe. The fact that it was safe at the time of Powell's examination did not prove that it was safe before it fired the fatal shot, the appellate court found.

The district court had also noted that there was no evidence of the sear engagement being unsafe at the time it was fired. The appellate court found this half-true. While it was impossible to know the precise position of the sear at the moment before the rifle fired, Powell did find debris in the fire control housing, a type of debris previously found to interfere with the sear engagement.

The district court noted as well that Powell had testified he had never seen this precipitous sear engagement. The appellate court, however, found that Powell had testified that he had never seen it occur in an "accident rifle", a rifle that had allegedly fired without pulling the trigger, but he had seen unsafe, low sear engagements in non-accident rifles with the same Walker trigger system as the Remington 700.

The appellate court reversed the district court's exclusion of Powell's testimony and its granting of the motion for summary judgment, remanding to the district court.