The Alaska Supreme Court has affirmed the ruling of a lower court, effectively dismissing the claim of a spectator, who sued a school district after a football player collided with her on the sideline during a game, breaking her leg.
The spectator, Helen Barton, had claimed on appeal that the lower court, the Superior Court of the State of Alaska, Second Judicial District, had erred when it excluded testimony from a landscape architect, who served as her expert witness. The high court deemed the error “harmless.”
The origin of the lawsuit was an incident that occurred on August 17, 2007 during a football game. Barton, an elderly spectator, alleged that she had to watch the game from the sidelines because there was inadequate seating elsewhere. At one point during the game, several football players went out-of-bounds near the 15- or 20-yard line and at least one of them collided with Barton, knocking her to the ground. Barton suffered a broken left leg and also claimed injuries to her left knee, back, and hip.
Barton sued the North Slope Borough School District for negligence, alleging in part that the football field had not been designed or built with a proper “run-off” area along the sidelines, and that spectators had improperly been allowed to stand in the run-off area during the game. The school district countered that it “owed no duty to protect Barton, a spectator, from the open and obvious risk of being struck by players while standing near the sidelines during a football game.”
Barton retained expert Juliet Vong, a landscape architect, who was brought in to testify that she used a particular manual — Sports Fields: A Manual for Design, Construction and Maintenance — in designing sports fields “to help ensure the appropriate dimensions and design criteria are met for a given sport and level of play.”
The school district filed a motion in limine to exclude Vong’s testimony because “it did not provide an admissible expert opinion.” The superior court agreed and excluded Vong’s report and testimony.
It ultimately found for the school district. Barton appealed.
In its review of the arguments, the high court noted that the superior court had concluded that Vong’s report and testimony “was not admissible expert testimony under Alaska Evidence Rule 702 (since it did) not articulate that is the industry standard for construction of athletic fields, nor does her report give any guidance on how she would apply the manual to the facts of this case in order to assist the jury.”
The court disagreed.
“By acquainting the jury with the standards set out in Sports Fields, Vong could have appreciably assisted the trier of fact by presenting the jury with information from which it could have drawn its own inferences,” the court wrote. “We therefore conclude that it was error to exclude Vong’s testimony.”
The court continued: “However, the error was harmless. What the two sides chiefly disputed was not whether 25 feet was enough distance for the runoff area, but instead whether the district had invited people closer to the field than that. The architect’s testimony would not have helped the jury answer that question.”
Helen Barton v. North Slope Borough School District; S.Ct.Alaska; Supreme Court No. S-14086, No. 6644, 268 P.3d 346; 2012 Alas. LEXIS 16; 1/20/12
Attorneys of Record: (for Appellant) Jeffrey J. Barber, Barber & Sims, LLC, Anchorage. (for Appellee) Laura L. Farley, Farley & Graves, P.C., Anchorage.
