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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Legal Newsline) – The Arkansas Supreme Court has affirmed a $630,000 slip-and-fall verdict over the objection of one justice who says a wet sidewalk is not an unreasonably dangerous condition.
The court issued its decision May 28 in Karen Elder’s lawsuit against Dollar General, affirming a Montgomery County’s verdict that found Elder only 10% at fault for the fall.
She was able to convince the jury that the fall caused subsequent injuries that eventually required neck back and shoulder surgeries even though she’d experienced pain in the area for six years before the fall.
The court found Elder’s chiropractor was able to make a causal link between the injuries and the fall.
“Indeed, (Eric) Carson had treated Elder since 2004 and was uniquely qualified to testify as to the causal connection between her fall and her subsequent medical procedures because he was familiar with her condition both before and after her fall,” wrote Justice Courtney Rae Hudson.
“Carson’s specific training and his expertise were relevant to the weight a jury might give to his testimony, but the circuit court did not abuse its discretion when it allowed him to provide causation testimony.”
Dissenting from that thinking were three justices, including Josephine Linker Hart. She said an outdoor sidewalk isn’t turned into a dangerous condition just because it’s raining.
And Carson’s testimony “simply went too far,” she wrote.
“ The chiropractor was the only expert who supplied testimony regarding causation, but that testimony covered surgeries and procedures that he had no involvement with and that were outside his area of expertise,” Hart wrote.
She also said Dollar General and its landlord should have received a continuance after Carson decided he’d testify. He had said earlier that he would not to testify to the cause of any treatment by other physicians.
“Then, two weeks before trial, the chiropractor did an about-face to the effect that he would be opining as to the cause of all those other medical treatments,” Hart wrote.
“Allowing this was erroneous and amounts to trial by ambush.”