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Czarnecki v. Volkswagen of America12/31/1991
urer. Responding to the argument that, because the manufacturer's liability is only for the enhanced injury, there is no proof of an enhanced injury without the plaintiff proving that the injury would not have occurred in the first collision, the court stated:
The difficulty with this reasoning is that where there is but a single indivisible injury (e.g., death, paraplegia) it requires plaintiffs to rely on pure speculation, since in many instances it is impossible to show which tortfeasor caused the indivisible harm.
Id. at 1205. Because the paraplegic injury was indivisible as a matter of law and was not capable of apportionment, the Eighth Circuit held that the jury should have been instructed that the manufacturer would be liable as a joint and several tortfeasor with the driver of the car if it found the defective design was a substantial factor in producing the plaintiff's paraplegia. Id. at 1209-10. The Mitchell court based its decision, in part, on Mathews v. Mills, 288 Minn. 16, 178 N.W.2d 841 (1970) -- a case that is significantly similar to Holtz v. Holder. In Mathews, the Minnesota Supreme Court held that, where two or more persons act independently and commit consecutive negligent acts closely related in time and where it is not reasonably possible to apportion the damages between the separate negligent acts, the tortfeasors
must be treated as jointly and severally liable. 178 N.W.2d at 844.
Explaining the premise behind its holding in a multiple collision case, the Holtz court found:
The "single injury " rule is based on the proposition that it is more desirable, as a matter of policy, for an injured and innocent plaintiff to recover his entire damages jointly and severally from independent tortfeasors, one of whom may have to pay more than his just share, than it is to let two or more wrongdoers escape liability altogether, simply because the plaintiff cannot carry the impossible burden of proving the respective shares of causation or because the tortfeasors have not committed a joint tort.
101 Ariz. at 251, 418 P.2d at 588. We believe the Holtz policy determination should apply with equal force to a crashworthiness case in which the cause of resulting injury is indivisible. If the injury suffered is indivisible, the plaintiff is no more likely to be able to prove those damages that were enhanced by the defect than he would be able to prove a division of damage caused by separate acts of negligence. Consequently, we join those jurisdictions that reject the Huddell rationale and hold that, in a crashworthiness case with an indivisible injury, the plaintiff fulfills his burden of proof by showing that the defective design caused him to sustain injuries over and above those that otherwise would have occurred in the first collision. Once the plaintiff has done so, the burden shifts to the defendant to show that the damages that arose from the enhanced injury are apportionable.
2. Evidentiary Support for the Instructions
VW argues on appeal that, even if we should adopt the apportionment instructions in a crashworthiness case, it was not error for the trial court to refuse to give them in this case because no evidentiary support for them exists.
As noted above, Czarnecki does not argue that the instructions were required under either his or VW's first theory. Although paraplegia might generally be considered an indivisible injury, the cause of Czarnecki's paraplegia was separate and divisible under either of these theories. Under Czarnecki's theory, the first impact resulted in a Chance fracture with n
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