ATLANTA (Legal Newsline) - Snap Inc. might be to blame for a car accident in which a woman rear-ended another car at 107 mph while using SnapChat’s Speed Filter feature, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled, rejecting arguments companies shouldn’t be liable for the criminal misuse of their products.
The majority decision by Justice Verda Colvin drew a lukewarm concurrence from three justices who said it didn’t account for the real costs of defending against such lawsuits. Two justices dissented, saying the majority had extended Georgia law for the first time to effectively require companies to design their products so they can’t be used to commit crimes.
Christal McGee was driving more than 100 miles an hour when her car collided with one driven by Wentworth Maynard, who suffered severe injuries. Maynard sued Snap, claiming the company had negligently designed Speed Filter to encourage illegal speeding. As evidence, he cited the fact Snap knew people were misusing the app and had installed a warning against using Speed Filter while driving.
A trial court dismissed the case, saying Snap didn’t have a duty to protect Maynard against misuse of its products. A divided appeals court upheld that decision, but the Georgia Supreme Court reversed in a March 15 opinion.
The court ruled that Georgia law requires manufacturers to design their products to reduce risk of reasonably foreseeable harm, regardless of whether that involves legal or illegal use.
“Our decisional law does not recognize a blanket exception to a manufacturer’s design duty in all cases of intentional or tortious third-party use,” the majority opinion states.
The plaintiffs cited a 2019 decision from California allowing a similar lawsuit against Snap over car accidents involving the Speed Filter. The Georgia Supreme Court also previously advised the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals there was no reason to dismiss a lawsuit by a woman who was injured falling against a ski exerciser even though she wasn’t using it at the time.
Under that decision, “regardless of how a product was being used when an injury occurred – whether it was being used properly, improperly, intentionally, negligently, or not at all – a manufacturer may owe a design duty to an injured person,” the court said.
Snap and its supporters pointed to another California decision dismissing a lawsuit against Apple over a car accident in which an iPhone was involved. But in that case, the court ruled that Apple hadn’t encouraged the driver to use FaceTime and that the lack of a lock-out to prevent phone use while the car wasn’t a proximate cause of the crash.
The majority similarly rejected comparisons to decisions dismissing lawsuits against companies that made a texting system used by truck drivers, motorcycles that can go faster than the speed limit and fertilizer that can be used to make a bomb. And it dismissed criticism by industry groups that allowing lawsuits over products that are intentionally misused would expose companies to limitless liability, saying misuse is still a factor for courts to weigh on motion for summary judgment.
Even if such a case goes to trial and the jury finds for the plaintiff, the court went on, liability can be reduced to account for the plaintiff’s own fault.
While the high court decided that Snap might have had a duty to design a safer product, it didn’t express an opinion as to whether the case might be dismissed on other grounds, such as foreseeability, the risk-utility balance or proximate cause.
Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren concurred, joined by justices Michael Boggs and Carla Wong McMillan, saying there was no exception under Georgia’s strict-liability regime for illegal or intentional misuse. But the justices said the majority decision understated the cost of defending against lawsuits based on this theory.
“Even if a manufacturer ultimately does not face liability for the alleged design defect, the cost of proceeding past a motion to dismiss is real, and it is one that is not acknowledged adequately” in the decision, they said.
Justice Charles J. Bethel dissented, joined by Justice Shawn Ellen LaGrua, saying the majority extended the design duty of manufacturers beyond what is reasonably foreseeable. In this case, he wrote, McGee was committing several crimes simultaneously while using SnapChat.
“I know of no case in the decisional law of this state, or in the common law adopted by this state, imposing a duty on manufacturers to design their products to preclude their use in a crime,” the judge wrote. “In my view, this would be the first occasion where Georgia law was understood to impose a duty on manufacturers to account for the criminal conduct of others in the design of their product."