Jury Awards $125,000 to Laundry Worker Who Lost Three Fingers in Commercial Ironer

Nancy Brown had worked at Stillwater Laundry in Stillwater, Oklahoma for only two days. She had spent about fifteen minutes on the American Standard Six-Roll Flatwork Ironer, a large commercial machine that carries garments on a feeder belt through six steam-heated rollers pressed against a steam chest.

While she was feeding a hospital gown into the machine, a wrinkle formed and she reached to straighten it. Her right hand caught in the gown and was drawn into the hot rollers. The hand was badly burned, and three fingers had to be amputated.

Brown sued McGraw-Edison Company and its division, the American Laundry Machinery Company, in federal court in Oklahoma. She pointed to two defects. The first was the electrical shut-off: once activated, it let the rollers coast about twelve inches, far enough to keep pulling a hand in. The second was the absence of any cover over the feeder belt area that would have kept an operator's hand out of the ironing mechanism. Both sides' experts agreed the shut-off could not stop the rollers in time to save a hand like hers.

The contest at trial was over who was responsible for the electrical shut-off. The manufacturer argued that the machine, which dated from the 1920s or 1930s, originally had a mechanical safety device that stopped the rollers within about an inch, and that someone else had later replaced it with the electrical system. Brown's side countered with the laundry manager's testimony that every such ironer he had seen since 1942 carried the same kind of electrical shut-off, and with her safety expert's opinion that American Laundry made the electrical safety equipment, based on its castings and on the identical electrical systems he found on the five or six ironers of that model he examined.

After a five-day trial, the jury awarded her $125,000. The defendants asked for judgment notwithstanding the verdict or a new trial. The trial judge denied both, while acknowledging that the defense had made a powerful argument and that the case might have come out differently had it been tried without a jury.

On appeal, Brown's counsel of record was Glen Mullins of Abel, Musser, Sokolosky & Clark in Oklahoma City, the firm now known as Abel Law Firm, with Ed Abel also on the brief. The Tenth Circuit affirmed on June 1, 1984, in an opinion by Judge Holloway. It held that the testimony of the laundry manager and the safety expert gave the jury enough to decide who altered the machine, that the missing feeder cover supported liability on its own, and that the weight and credibility of the competing experts were for the jury. The court noted that the defense had put on considerable evidence and that the jury could easily have found the other way, but it saw no abuse of discretion in letting the verdict stand.