Jefferson James Davis on Mason v. The Home Depot U.S.A., Inc.
Arvin Ritchey Mason bought and used Varathane, a wood finish manufactured by the Flecto Company and sold by Home Depot. The next year, he and Ms. Mason, asserting that the Varathane injured him when he inhaled its vapors, sued the two companies. In Mason v. The Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., the Georgia Supreme Court approved the use of Daubert expert evidence standards for civil cases. In this commentary, Jefferson James Davis explores the implications of the supreme court’s important decision. He writes:
The case first went to trial in February 2005, eight years after it was filed. Five days before that trial, however, the Governor signed into law the Tort Reform Act of 2005. One part of that statute (codified as O.C.G.A. § 24-9-67.1) overhauled Georgia’s expert witness statute, making it more like the corresponding federal evidence rule and case law by enhancing the trial judge’s role of gatekeeper for expert evidence. Based on the new statute, the defendants moved to exclude the testimony of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. The trial court denied the motion, however, on the ground that applying the new statute after years of discovery under the former expert-witness rules would violate the Georgia Constitution’s proscription against retroactive laws.
The trial then took an unexpected turn, ending in a hung jury and a mistrial. The defendants at that point renewed their motion to exclude the expert testimony, and the plaintiffs responded by launching a multi-pronged attack on the new statute. The trial court granted the motion this time, however. In doing so, the court rejected some of the prongs of the plaintiffs’ attack, accepted other prongs but severed offending parts of the statute, and found that the proposed testimony of both of plaintiffs’ expert witnesses failed to satisfy the resulting statute’s reliability standards. The plaintiffs appealed the two orders without proceeding to a second trial.
. . . .
The Supreme Court by a 5-2 vote affirmed the trial court’s exclusion of the expert witnesses’ testimony. In their appeal, the Masons argued that the new statute should be invalidated on equal protection and due process grounds; that, due to retroactivity, the statute should not be applied to them; and that, if the statute were to be found valid and generally applicable to them, it was incorrectly used in excluding their witnesses. From the plaintiffs’ viewpoint, the linchpin of the Court’s decision is the rejection of their retroactivity argument, since a win for them on that one point would have obviated rulings on the other prongs of their attack.
(citations omitted)