Durette v. Virgil

356 P.3d 639, 272 Or. App. 545, 2015 Ore. App. LEXIS 885
CourtCourt of Appeals of Oregon
DecidedJuly 22, 2015
DocketC104897CV; A152871
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 356 P.3d 639 (Durette v. Virgil) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Oregon primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Durette v. Virgil, 356 P.3d 639, 272 Or. App. 545, 2015 Ore. App. LEXIS 885 (Or. Ct. App. 2015).

Opinion

WILSON, S. J.

Plaintiff appeals a judgment in a motor vehicle accident personal injury action resulting in a jury verdict for defendant. She contends that the trial court erred in admitting the testimony of an expert witness who opined—based on his analysis of photographs of, and a repair estimate for, plaintiffs vehicle after the collision—that the collision could not have produced the forces necessary to cause the claimed injuries to plaintiffs neck and back. We conclude that the evidence was relevant and that the record was sufficient to show the validity of the expert’s methodology. We further conclude that the witness was qualified to render the opinions that he gave. Finally, we conclude that other evidence presented to the jury after the OEC 104 hearing at which the trial court made its evidentiary ruling did not affect the admissibility of the expert’s testimony. Plaintiff also assigns error to the trial court’s denial of her motion for a new trial on the ground that the court erred in admitting the expert’s testimony. That error is not reviewable because it is based on alleged errors committed during trial. Accordingly, we affirm.

I. FACTS

On August 14, 2008, plaintiff was stopped at a stoplight when defendant rear-ended her car. Plaintiff did not have any head, neck or back pain on the day of the collision. She went forward with her plans to drive to Lincoln City the following day to spend a week vacationing with her father. By the day after the collision, plaintiff began to experience páin in her neck and upper back. When the pain did not subside, she cut her vacation short and returned home to begin chiropractic treatment. Plaintiff received chiropractic care for headaches, neck pain, pain down her right arm, blurred vision, and balance problems.

Plaintiff had experienced back and neck pain for which she had received treatment off and on since the early 1990’s. She had been in another collision in 2004 in which her car had been struck from the side at the rear. She had been symptom free for about eight months before the August 14, 2008, collision.

[547]*547Defendant admitted that she was negligent in causing the collision. The only issue tried to the jury was plaintiffs noneconomic damages, for which she sought $7,500. The first question on the verdict form was: “Was the defendant’s negligence a substantial factor in causing injury to plaintiff?” The jury answered unanimously, “no.”

Plaintiff had moved in limine to exclude the testimony of defendant’s expert, Bradley Probst, raising several grounds for her objection. First, she argued that because Probst is not licensed as an engineer in the State of Oregon, it would be a crime for him to testify about his analysis and opinions. Second, plaintiff argued that Probst was not qualified to opine that the forces in the collision could not have caused her injury. She did not assert that Probst lacked qualifications as a biomechanical engineer. Rather, plaintiffs counsel explained:

“The challenge will be not as much to the qualifications of a biomechanical engineer, because there really is no degree or certification for such a thing. The challenge is to an expert, who is not a medical expert and has no training in medicine except a couple classes in anatomy and neurophysiology, can say, let alone any expert, that a force did not injure a person in a particular motor vehicle collision.”

Third, plaintiff contended that, even if Probst was qualified to reach such an opinion, he lacked a foundation for doing so when he relied only on photographs of the damage to plaintiffs car and, perhaps, on plaintiffs testimony about the damage to her car and the repairs performed.

At plaintiffs request, the trial court conducted an OEC 104 hearing outside the presence of the jury.1 In that hearing, Probst described his education, which included a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, a Master of Science in biomedical engineering, and all work for a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering except defense of his thesis. Probst testified that, as part of his course work, he took courses in anatomy, physiology, and neurophysiology with medical students at Tulane Medical School. He also took courses in [548]*548bone mechanics, orthopedic biomechanics, human tissue, tissue engineering, material science, and other biomedical engineering courses at the Tulane engineering school. Probst testified that, throughout his career, he has “worked and trained and mentored under licensed medical doctors as well.”

Probst testified at some length about the field of biomedical engineering:

“I guess I need to define what a biomedical engineer is. It seems like there’s always a very large misconception of what a biomedical engineer is, what I’m actually doing. I’m not diagnosing an injury. That’s stating whether an injury does or does not exist. I’m taking at face value what the medical records show, and what I’m doing is an engineering analysis. I’m performing, in essence, structural engineering on the human body. So I’m not performing a medical diagnosis. I’m strictly performing * * * biomedical engineering analyses on the human body.
“So I’m treating the human body as a mechanical structure, applying engineering techniques, material science techniques, laws of physics, science and engineering to understand how a material responds to a force. That’s engineering. An engineer can look at a material, put a force on it and understand how it responds. It’s very common that engineers apply this to living materials or biologic materials. We can understand how wood reacts to a force. Wood was a living material at one point in time. Sometimes we still use it. There’s treehouses and various things like that. So engineers can understand how a material responds to a force.
“So my background, obviously the mechanical engineering aspect, allows me to understand the material * * * values of these vehicles and how those materials respond to force and how crush occurs or how damage or how some type of failure occurs to the vehicle.
“Once we know what’s occurring to the vehicle, we can understand how that occupant is going to respond, again, based upon the laws of science, physics and engineering, and we can also confirm this through scientific studies and peer-reviewed publications. We look how the occupants respond, and again we look to see what kind of forces are placed on these objects, if you will, or this material, how [549]*549does that material respond? Does that material fail? And we’re simply saying whether or not something can or cannot occur based upon the laws of physics.”

Probst described his methodology in analyzing whether a particular collision could have produced the injuries claimed:

“[W]e do use, again, accepted methodologies. These are peer-reviewed, published, scientifically accepted methodologies of how [to] perform what is known as a biomedical injury assessment analysis. Again, we’re looking at the causal relationship, not whether an actual injury does exist. We’re looking to see if an event can cause an outcome, if you will. So we use these accepted techniques. Again, we’re looking at the severity of the incident, the direction of impact, things of that nature, to understand how the vehicle would respond.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
356 P.3d 639, 272 Or. App. 545, 2015 Ore. App. LEXIS 885, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/durette-v-virgil-orctapp-2015.