Why a $1.3 Million Grocery-Store Verdict Vanished: Proximate Cause in Ohio Premises Cases

Published October 22, 2019 · Ohio Supreme Court

A shopper standing at a bakery counter is knocked to the floor by a store-owned motorized cart. She cannot get up and leaves by ambulance. A jury hears that the store gives no instructions to the people who drive its carts and that it knew of more than a hundred earlier cart incidents. The jury awards compensatory damages and more than a million dollars in punitive damages.

On September 19, 2019, the Supreme Court of Ohio wiped out that entire verdict. Rieger v. Giant Eagle, Inc., 2019-Ohio-3745, is not a case about whether the store did anything wrong. It is about a single element every injured person must prove: that the defendant's specific failure actually caused this specific injury. Understanding why the verdict fell is the best way to make sure a strong case does not meet the same fate.

What happened in the store

In December 2012, Barbara Rieger was standing at the bakery counter of a Giant Eagle in Brook Park, near Cleveland, when another customer driving one of the store's motorized carts struck her shopping cart. She was knocked to the ground, could not stand, and was taken to the hospital. Her medical bills were $11,511.

The cart driver had been diagnosed with dementia before the incident, and her husband testified she had never been trained to operate the cart. A Giant Eagle representative testified that the store provides the carts for customers with mobility limitations, posts no operating instructions on them, and assumes people who use them know how to drive them. Rieger also presented evidence of 117 incidents involving motorized carts at company-owned Giant Eagle stores from 2004 to 2012.

The Cuyahoga County jury found Giant Eagle negligent and awarded $121,000 in compensatory damages and $1,198,000 in punitive damages. The Eighth District Court of Appeals upheld the compensatory award but reduced the punitive damages to $242,000 under Ohio's punitive-damages cap.

Why the Supreme Court reversed

Every negligence claim has three parts: a duty, a breach of that duty, and an injury proximately caused by the breach. Ohio applies a "but for" test: the defendant's conduct is a cause of the harm if the harm would not have happened without it. It is not enough to show that the defendant's failure might have caused the injury.

The unanimous Court framed the question this way: was there any evidence that Rieger would not have been hurt if Giant Eagle had trained or instructed the cart driver? The Court found none. Specifically:

• No link between the 117 prior incidents and lack of training. The evidence showed the incidents happened, but not that they were caused by drivers who did not know how to operate the carts.
• No link between lack of training and this collision. The driver had used the store's carts regularly for well over a year without an earlier accident.
• No evidence about the dementia's effect. There was no testimony, from an expert or anyone else, that the driver's dementia made her incompetent to operate the cart or caused the crash, and no evidence that her condition was noticeable to store employees.

The Court called the plaintiff's theory that training would have prevented the accident "speculation." Without causation evidence, the negligence claim and the related negligent-entrustment claim (letting an unfit person use the cart) should never have gone to the jury. The Court entered judgment for Giant Eagle.

The punitive damages fell with it

Under R.C. 2315.21(C), punitive damages are available only if there is a verdict for the plaintiff on compensatory damages. Once the compensatory award was gone, the punitive award had nothing to stand on. I discussed how punitive damages attach to the underlying claim in an earlier post on punitive damages.

The Dayton-area case the Court relied on

The Supreme Court leaned on a 2014 decision from the Second District Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Dayton and the surrounding counties: Johnson v. Wal-Mart Stores E., L.P., 2014-Ohio-2998. There, a shopper at a Springfield Walmart was injured in a collision or near-collision with a customer using a store motorized cart. Walmart did not train cart users either. The Second District held that the lack of training did not create a jury question, because there was no evidence that the driver's lack of instruction caused the collision.

Together, the two cases make the rule clear for shoppers throughout Ohio: showing that a store has a careless policy is not the same as showing that the policy caused your injury.

What evidence could make the difference

This decision is a hard one for injured shoppers, and it is fair to say that the bar for proving causation in store-injury cases is now clearly set at the highest court in the state. But the opinion also tells us what kind of proof would have changed the analysis:

• How the collision actually happened. Store surveillance video, witness accounts, and an investigation of the cart's speed and path can show whether the driver made an operating error that instruction would have prevented, such as confusing forward and reverse or not knowing how to stop.
• Why prior incidents happened. A list of 117 incidents is powerful only if their causes are known. Incident reports, claim files, and testimony about what went wrong in earlier collisions can show a pattern tied to the store's failure.
• Expert testimony. A human-factors or equipment expert can explain how training, warnings, speed limits on the carts, or screening would have prevented the specific collision. A medical expert can address whether a driver's condition made safe operation impossible.
• What employees saw. If staff observed a driver struggling with a cart, or knew of her condition, that knowledge goes to both negligent entrustment and causation.

Much of that evidence belongs to the store, and some of it, like video, is erased quickly. Earlier this month I wrote about how notice is proven in slip-and-fall cases; the same lesson applies here. Investigation must begin early, and the right expert must be involved before the case is filed, not after.

What this means for you

If you were hurt in a store, whether by a motorized cart, a falling display, a spill, or an employee's actions, the business's insurer will test every link in the chain from its conduct to your injury. Proving the business was careless is necessary but not enough. We build these cases from the start around causation: what happened, why it happened, and why it would not have happened if the business had done its job. Our premises liability and personal injury pages explain how we approach these claims.