Clark v. Mazda Motor Corporation3/4/2003
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I concur in today's opinion and write separately to provide an additional analysis of the question to be answered.
The manufacturer sued for imposition of products liability must be afforded full opportunity to show that (a) the seat's occupant restraint system was free of the attributed harm-dealing defect and/or (b) the plaintiff's injury is unrelated to the manufacturer's alleged breach of duty. In discharging the onus of showing a liability-defeating defense, it may likely prove critical also to demonstrate that, at the time in question, the provided restraint mechanism stood disengaged, in whole or in part. Due process would indeed mean very little if, in the described scenario, a legislatively erected § 12-420 bar were potent enough to destroy the manufacturer's only means of exoneration through its proof of an absent causal nexus between the plaintiff's harm and the allegedly defective product. Oklahoma's due process is co-extensive with that in the federal constitution. Fair School Finance Council v. State, 1987 OK 114, 54, 746 P.2d 1135, 1148 n. 48. Statutory barriers to essential proof of one's innocence (in a criminal case) or of one's complete exoneration (in a civil case) must yield to the Constitution's superior gauge of fundamental fairness. See, e.g., Rock v. Arkansas, 483 U.S. 44, 62, 107 S.Ct. 2704, 2714, 97 L.Ed.2d 37 (1987); Green v. Georgia, 442 U.S. 95, 97, 99 S.Ct. 2150, 2151-52, 60 L.Ed.2d 738 (1979); Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 319-20, 94 S.Ct. 1105, 1112, 39 L.Ed.2d 347 (1974); Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 302, 93 S.Ct. 1038, 1049, 35 L.E.2d 297 (1973); Washington v. State of Texas, 388 U.S. 14, 19, 87 S.Ct. 1920, 1923, 18 L.Ed.2d 1019 (1967). Similar law-imposed obstacles to those encountered here in § 12-420, which unreasonably impede full disclosure of the truth, are an anathema to due process. In re Adoption of C.D.M., 2001 OK 103, 1, 39 P.3d 802, 813 n. 5 (Opala, J., dissenting); Three M Investments, Inc. v. Ahrend Co., 1992 OK 33, 9, 827 P.2d 1324, 1335 n. 34 (Opala, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
It is far from clear why the question we answer today was certified to this court, unless, of course, counsel succeeded in persuading the federal trial judge that in products litigation the provisions of § 12-420 may be regarded as Oklahoma's substantive law. Several extant federal decisions appear to have so concluded with respect to similar enactments from other states. Oklahoma's own precedent militates strongly in favor of an opposite view. If there was ever any doubt about the character of the § 12-420 bar in its application to products cases, it should now appear more clearly resolved than ever before. Today's opinion plainly declares the bar to apply solely to negligence cases. It does not govern products liability litigation. Our conclusion should firmly free the certifying court of any concern about the bar's application to the trial of this case. Once the § 12-420 bar is swept away, admissibility of an occupant's use or non-use of restraints will, in this case, be controlled solely by the federal evidence law's standards of relevance and, in state-court cases, by the standards of relevance under the Oklahoma Evidence Code. They should give ample comfort to the plaintiff and no small amount of protection to the defendant who, much unlike in negligence cases, must wage a forensic battle (for its product's reasonable safety) without the benefit of the comparative fault's liability-reducing defense. Only then will evenhanded fairness, our legal tradition's age-old prophesy, once again carry the day for the claim we make to uncompromising excellence in our adversarial process of adjudication.
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