Products Liability Law Reporter

A federal district court held that a pressure cooker manufacturer was not liable to a woman who was burned when her pressure cooker opened while it was still pressurized.

Destiny Moore was using a Presto electric pressure cooker to make mashed potatoes. After the potatoes were finished, Moore turned the appliance’s steam release valve to the release position and began opening the lid. As she did so, the lid flew up, and the contents of the pressure cooker ejected, burning Moore. She sued National Presto Industries, Inc., alleging negligence and strict liability defective design and failure to warn. The defense moved for summary judgment on the basis that the opinions of the plaintiff’s expert, Derek King, were inadmissible.

Granting the motion, the district court found that under Wisconsin law, a product is considered defective in design where its foreseeable risks of harm could have been reduced or avoided by adopting a reasonable alternative design and omitting the alternative design renders the product not reasonably safe. Here, the court found, the plaintiff did not identify which part of the pressure cooker’s design is defective or flawed. King’s hypotheses for what led to the plaintiff’s injuries—including the failure of the pressure cooker’s interlock mechanism or the eruption of an air bubble trapped in the food—were not proven to have actually happened, the court said.

The court added that the expert, who acknowledged he had not examined the plaintiff’s pressure cooker himself, also failed to identify any safer alternative design. Thus, the court concluded that King’s opinions were not based on sufficient facts or data and that his report had failed to establish that a reasonable alternative design would have reduced the risk of injury.

Turning to the plaintiff’s inadequate warning claim, the court noted that a product is defective due to inadequate instructions or warnings if the foreseeable risks of harm could have been reduced or avoided if the manufacturer had provided reasonable instructions or warnings and the omission of such instructions or warnings rendered the product not reasonably safe. Nevertheless, the court pointed out that the plaintiff had not articulated why the pressure cooker’s warnings were inadequate or how this led to her injuries. Moreover, King offered no opinion about the adequacy of the warnings or a detailed analysis about the device’s warnings or how it posed foreseeable risks of harm. As a result, the court concluded, the plaintiff had not offered evidence allowing a reasonable jury to conclude that her injuries resulted from inadequate warnings.

Finally, the court held that although the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of care, King cited no evidence that the defendant had failed to perform adequate failure testing. The expert’s report provided only rank speculation that the defendant had breached a duty to design and manufacture a safe product, the court said.

Citation: Moore v. Nat’l Presto Indus., Inc., No. 20-cv-1060-jdp (W.D. Wis. May 17, 2022).