A Florida appeals court has overturned a trial court’s ruling and allowed a case against Carlisle Industrial Brake & Friction Inc. Joan Smith, the suit says, suffered mesothelioma from breathing asbestos fibres on her husband’s work clothes while he was working on big trucks.
Case Details and Evidence Presented
The First District Court of Appeal unanimously reinstated the case, originally thrown out by an Okaloosa County judge. Joan Smith, who had cleaned her husband’s clothes and allegedly sucked on asbestos dust, was an asbestos-contaminated worker. Her husband worked on brake linings on Mack Trucks (1969-93).
At the core of the pitch was whether the brake linings that Carlisle had supplied to Mack Trucks were asbestos-free, and if those linings could be identified as causing Joan’s exposure. Carlisle disagreed and suggested that there was no evidence to support the association as the supplier of asbestos-free brake linings at the time.
But the plaintiff, Joan’s son Larry Smith, presented evidence that Mack Trucks used Carlisle brake linings solely from 1974-79, and they renamed them Mack. That was enough evidence for the appeals court to conclude a possible connection with Carlisle, and satisfy the product-identification requirement of Florida law.
Florida law mandates that the plaintiff show it is “more likely than not” that the defendant’s product was the cause of the asbestos exposure. The appeals court pointed to 1984’s Florida Supreme Court decision in Gooding v University Hospital stating that Larry Smith had achieved this standard with circumstantial evidence.
While Carlisle claimed it wasn’t the only supplier of brake linings for those particular years, the appellate judges noted the amount of brake work Mr. Smith did, and they ruled that the more brake jobs Mr. Smith did, the greater his chances of encountering Carlisle’s products. This and the sheer number of linings needed to replace every truck also favored the prospect of repeated exposure to Carlisle’s asbestos-laced products.
The court also said that the issue of whether any other suppliers contributed to Joan Smith’s asbestos exposure should be decided by a jury and therefore proceeded to trial. This settlement is a major move toward resolving the issues facing secondary asbestos-exposure families.
