AUSTIN, Texas (Legal Newsline) – A trial court was wrong to order the alcohol and drug test results of all UPS drivers in Irving, Texas, in a wrongful death lawsuit concerning only one of them.
The Texas Supreme Court made that decision June 17 in an appeal in the lawsuit over the death of Nathan Dean Clark.
Clark was killed in September 2017 when a UPS driver was involved in a multi-vehicle collision and then tested positive for THC.
UPS is contending that didn’t cause the accident and produced information about its alcohol and drug testing programs that are federally mandated. The driver admitted he had been using marijuana for at least two years prior to the collision, but he’d only been drug tested once.
The attorney for Clark’s estate sought to establish a pattern of failing to adequately drug test Irving drivers, and a trial judge rejected UPS’s contention that the discovery request for every drivers’ tests was overbroad and irrelevant.
The Supreme Court called the request a “fishing expedition.”
“This lawsuit arises from a motor-vehicle accident involving a single UPS driver. Confidential drug-test results for UPS drivers who were neither involved nor implicated in causing the accident that claimed Clark’s life are irrelevant, as they do not make any fact consequential to McElduff’s claims more or less probable than it would be without the results,” the decision says.
“Whether any other UPS driver tested positive or negative for drugs or alcohol on unrelated occasions does not make it more or less probable that Villareal was negligent on the occasion in question.
“The test results that actually bear on the defendants’ alleged culpability—Villarreal’s test results—have already been produced.”