Products Liability Law Reporter

A federal district court held that a new trial was not warranted after a jury ruled that the manufacturer and seller of an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) device was not liable to a patient who received over 90 ECT treatments for depression.

Jeffrey Thelen suffered from severe depression and other mental health problems. He underwent over 90 ECT treatments using a Thymatron IV ECT device manufactured and sold by Somatics, LLC, and experienced neurological injury, including memory loss and brain damage. Thelen sued Somatics, LLC, alleging strict liability failure to warn. A jury determined that the defendant had failed to provide adequate warnings or instructions but that this was not the proximate cause of Thelen’s damages. Thelen subsequently moved for a new trial or to alter or amend the judgment, arguing that the court had erred regarding its instructions to the jury on causation.

Affirming, the court considered whether the trial court had erred by instructing the jury that to prove the defendant’s failure to warn the plaintiff’s physician was a proximate cause of injury, the plaintiff must prove that a different warning would have altered the physician’s conduct. This causation requirement flows from the learned intermediary doctrine, under which the defendant’s duty to warn of the Thymatron’s risks ran to the plaintiff’s physicians, not to the plaintiff directly. The court noted that Nebraska’s federal courts have applied this principle as part of Nebraska law and that the plaintiff cites no contrary Nebraska authority. The court also found that the plaintiff did not propose an alternative instruction to explain to the jury how the learned intermediary doctrine informs the causation inquiry. A lay jury could not be expected to understand this on its own, the court said, adding that had counsel been left to argue under a generic causation instruction, the jury would have been faced with conflicting arguments on the parameters of the plaintiff’s burden.

Consequently, the court concluded that the jury’s finding that the plaintiff had failed to establish causation was supported by the evidence, and there was no basis for a new trial on this ground.

Citation: Thelen v. Somatics, LLC, 2023 WL 7323139 (M.D. Fla. Nov. 7, 2023).