Products Liability Law Reporter

A federal district court held that the manufacturer of a field drug test was not liable to a woman who spent more than three months in jail after she was arrested following a false-positive drug test result indicating she was in possession of methamphetamine.

Here, Dasha Fincher was riding in a car that was stopped by two Monroe County sheriff’s deputies. After a search of the vehicle, one of the deputies produced a plastic bag with a light blue substance and tested the contents with the Nark II Presumptive Drug Test Kit, a roadside methamphetamine test kit manufactured by Sirchie Acquisition Co. One of the deputies then told Fincher that the test was positive, leading to her arrest. She spent 94 days in jail before she was released following a Georgia Bureau of Investigation test indicating the blue substance was cotton candy, not methamphetamine.

Fincher sued Sirchie Acquisition, alleging design defect and inadequate warning, among other claims. The defense moved to dismiss. 

Granting the motion, the court found that under the risk-utility test, a product design is defective if its risks outweigh its utility or benefit. Citing case law, the court noted that a manufacturer may be liable for a design defect where it fails to adopt a reasonable, safer alternative design that would have reduced foreseeable risks presented by the product. Although the plaintiff asserts that the defendant knew or should have known its test could lead to the arrest of an innocent person based on a false-positive drug test, the plaintiff does not set forth any reasonable alternative design, the court said. Without such an allegation, the court concluded, the plaintiff’s design defect claim cannot proceed based on mere unsupported legal conclusions.

Similarly, the court rejected the plaintiff’s inadequate warning claims. The court found that the plaintiff asserts conclusory statements without any factual support or allegation as to the lack of or exact impropriety of the defendant’s warnings regarding the test kit.

Citation: Fincher v. Monroe Cnty. Bd. of Comm’rs, 2019 WL 510448 (M.D. Ga. Feb. 8, 2019).