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Wagner v. Roche Laboratories5/12/1999
[Cite as Wagner v. Roche Laboratories (1999), ___ Ohio St.3d ___.]
Civil procedure - Defendant not sufficiently prejudiced by trial court's instruction on breach of express warranty, so that trial court did not err in denying defendants' motion for a new trial.
Submitted January 13, 1999
This is the second time this case has been before this court. In Wagner v. Roche Laboratories (1996), 77 Ohio St.3d 116, 671 N.E.2d 252, this court reviewed a court of appeals' judgment that had reversed a jury verdict in favor of plaintiff-appellant, Josephine Wagner, on her products liability claims against defendants-appellees, Roche Laboratories and Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc. ("Roche"). Wagner's suit against Roche was based on serious physical complications she claimed were caused in part by her ingestion of Accutane, a prescription drug developed and marketed by Roche for the treatment of acne. At issue in that appeal was her claim at trial that Roche had failed to provide adequate warnings about possible adverse reactions to Accutane that could arise for certain users.
The court of appeals had determined that " ` easonable minds could only conclude the warning provided by Roche for Accutane was adequate, and, therefore, the issue should not have been submitted to the jury,' " and further determined that the trial court erred by not entering a directed verdict for Roche. See 77 Ohio St.3d at 118, 671 N.E.2d at 255. In light of this holding, the court of appeals had found Roche's other assignment of error, as well as Wagner's entire cross-appeal, moot, and so did not address them.
This court reversed the judgment of the court of appeals, determining that Wagner had created a jury question on her failure-to-warn claim sufficient to overcome Roche's motion for a directed verdict. See 77 Ohio St.3d at 121, 671 N.E.2d at 256. We thus resolved the issue appealed in favor of Wagner, and so upheld the jury's determination of Roche's liability on failure-to-warn grounds. We remanded the cause to the court of appeals for that court to address the remaining assignments of error raised by both parties.
On remand, the court of appeals first considered Roche's remaining assignment of error, which urged that the trial court erred in denying its motion for a new trial for several distinct reasons. The court of appeals focused on Roche's argument that the jury was improperly instructed on breach of express and implied warranties, and again reversed the jury verdict in favor of Wagner. The court of appeals found, in a split decision, that there was no evidence presented to support the jury instruction on express warranty. The court of appeals further found that, despite the absence of interrogatories that could have clarified the grounds for the jury's decision, the giving of the express-warranty instruction was sufficiently prejudicial to Roche that a new trial should have been ordered.
The Dissenter at the court of appeals determined that there was substantial evidence in the record supporting Wagner's breach-of-express-warranty claim. Furthermore, the Dissenter would have found that the trial court did not err in denying the new trial motion, because there was no indication that Roche was prejudiced by the giving of the instruction, even if there would not have been support in the record for the claim.
The court of appeals on remand also considered Wagner's cross-assignments of error, upholding various rulings by the trial court with which Wagner took issue.
This cause is now before this court upon the allowance of a discretionary appeal.
The principal issue presented is whether Roche was sufficiently prejudice
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