To Spoil or Not to Spoil? Why Speculation Carried the Day for the Defense Against Plaintiff’s Spoliation Claims

This holiday season has been good to the asbestos defense bar.  On December 16, 2014, the Illinois Fourth District Appellate Court decided a case which emphasizes the need for a plaintiff to properly prove causation by non-speculative evidence.  In the process, the court rejected a “sham” spoliation of evidence claim, finding that defendant’s spoliation of evidence was immaterial in light of the witness testimony presented by the plaintiff.  This is the first published decision in this State pertaining to spoliation.

In Holloway v. Sprinkmann Sons Corp., 2014 IL App (4th) 131118, plaintiff Carol Holloway brought a negligence action against defendant Sprinkmann, an alleged asbestos insulation supplier, alleging that  defendant delivered and installed asbestos-containing insulation at plaintiff’s jobsite  while she worked as at the Eureka vacuum cleaner factory in Bloomington, IL.  As an alternative theory, plaintiff argued that Sprinkmann wrongfully destroyed evidence that plaintiff needed to prove her case.  Plaintiff specifically alleged that Sprinkmann destroyed records indicating the types of insulation it sold and to whom the insulation was sold.  Destroying this evidence, plaintiff argued, prevented her from demonstrating which specific asbestos-containing products were sold and delivered by Sprinkmann to her jobsites.

At trial, plaintiff called Arthur B. Kremers, Sprinkmann’s former owner.  When Kremers began working for Sprinkmann in 1969, old records dating back to the 1950s were kept in the basement of the company’s Peoria office.  These records showed the brand and manufacturer of each product defendant had sold and delivered, as well as which employees had installed each product.  Apparently, as early as 1957, Sprinkmann employees began making claims for asbestos-related disease, relying on the basement records to show which brands of insulation the employees had installed.Sometime in the 1980s, however, Kremers shipped the basement records to a recycling center because “defendant was running out of space.”  The destruction of the records, according to Kremers, was consistent with Sprinkmann’s document retention policy, under which sales contracts and invoices were to be retained for only three years.

Crying foul over the alleged “spoliation” of evidence, plaintiff called co-worker witness Ellis Carlton and read into evidence an affidavit of another deceased witness, Wesley Klein.  This evidence was uncontroverted, and – as the documents themselves would have done – established that asbestos-containing insulation supplied by defendant Sprinkmann was present at plaintiff’s jobsite and installed by it.

The jury nonetheless returned a general verdict in defendant’s favor, prompting plaintiff to file a motion for a new trial, which was denied by the trial court.  On appeal, plaintiff argued that the jury might have found for plaintiff if it had had the benefit of reviewing the destroyed records establishing that the products were present at plaintiff’s worksite.

The appellate court affirmed the trial court’s judgment.  In doing so, it focused on the fact that the uncontradicted evidence of Klein and Carlton already established that the products were present at the facility.  To the extent that the “spoliated” records would have done nothing more than supply the same information, the jury could have reasonably concluded that the destroyed records would have made no difference in plaintiff’s case.   Thus, the “spoliated” records were no consequence.  For this reason, the court found that plaintiff failed to meet her burden of proving that, but for the destruction of the records, she would have had a reasonable probability of prevailing. The court then expressly addressed the key issue in this case:  that “the real problem in plaintiff’s case was causation, which the records would not have addressed.”  Indeed, the court hammered home the fact that “all plaintiff offered in the trial was speculation that her asbestosis resulted from repair work on the pipe-covering insulation in the Eureka plan, although she never saw any repair work being done on the insulation and there was no other evidence placing her near any such repair work.”

Plaintiff attempted to substantiate her exposure using the testimony medical expert Dr. Arthur Frank in conjunction with her own testimony that she was “in all the different parts of the plant for one reason or another.”   Dr. Frank espoused the “re-entrainment” theory, testifying  that individuals who had never worked hands-on with an asbestos-containing product could still be exposed to asbestos fibers because these fibers drifted around the factory and could be carried a long way by air currents.  According to Dr. Frank, all asbestos-containing products, including steam pipe insulation, released such fibers.  In fact, simply the “passage of time” would release these fibers.  On the other hand, Frank also conceded that a person needed to cross a threshold of a certain amount of exposure before getting asbestosis; Frank could not clarify what the threshold was, though he insisted that, for someone with asbestosis, “each and every exposure to any asbestos product had to be regarded as a cause.”

The court, however, was unpersuaded by plaintiff’s interpretation of her own testimony.  Specifically, the court noted that saying that plaintiff was “in all the different parts of the plant for one reason or another” is not quite the same as saying she “worked all over the plant.”  For argument’s sake, the court assumed that Dr. Frank’s theories were correct, that when asbestos-containing insulation had to be repaired, it created asbestos dust, and that such dust stayed around for a long time and wafted through the air.  However, the court concluded that Frank’s testimony was ultimately irrelevant, as there was no evidence that the buildings in the Eureka plant shared the same air, nor was there any evidence presented suggesting that the buildings in the plant shared a common ventilation system.  Plaintiff could therefore not clearly connect the allegedlyomnipresent “asbestos dust”  to her own inhalation.  Even if she had, the court pointed out problems with the testimony of plaintiff’s “expert,” noting that Frank’s testimony provided no solid, non-speculative evidence that the amount of asbestos dust breathed in by plaintiff under such circumstances would be sufficient to cause asbestosis.

Holloway v. Sprinkmann places great importance on a plaintiff’s burden to show causation with non-speculative evidence.  For plaintiffs like Holloway, certain expert testimony may seem like a home run (eg., the “re-entrainment” theory), but, at the very heart of the matter, such evidence is nothing more than conjecture. In rejecting plaintiff’s spoliation argument, the Sprinkmann court further demonstrated that it will not permit “red herring” issues to distract the court from a lack of admissible evidence of causal links.  This decision from the Illinois appellate court provides further support for defendants seeking to attack speculative evidence, without fear that extrinsic issues that have no bearing on their ultimate liability will alter the result.