Jury Awards $2.27 Million to Man Who Fell Ten Feet When a Stair Handrail Collapsed

On December 17, 2002, Douglas Burnett walked through a new 12,000-square-foot office building in the Stonecrest Building Park in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He and his brother Mike owned the construction company running the project, and they had come to talk wiring options with an electrician. No work was under way that day. Framing had been finished and the crew had left about three weeks earlier.

The three men went up to the second floor, talked about dividing the space among prospective tenants, and started back down. Mike and the electrician reached the bottom without trouble. As Burnett came around a landing, he felt as though he had stepped into a hole. He pitched forward into a handrail, which collapsed, and fell face first onto a concrete floor about ten feet below.

The injuries were severe. Burnett broke bones in his face and around his right eye socket, along with other fractures. He suffered a brain injury that left him with a seizure disorder, permanent stacked and double vision, and a loss of peripheral vision in the right eye. He spent two months in the hospital. By the time of trial he was taking eleven pills a day to try to control the seizures.

The building's framing had been sold through a 'turn-key' program run by Boland-Maloney Lumber Company, which agreed to supply the materials and to perform and supervise the framing, stairways included. It subcontracted the labor to Second Framing Corporation but kept its own supervisor on the job. Burnett's lawyers, Thomas H. Hughes and Kerstin Schuhmann of Louisville, argued that the stairway had been framed with seven steps instead of the six on the blueprints. That 'double riser' left one step twice as tall as the rest, contrary to the plans and to the rule that stair risers be uniform. Second Framing was dismissed from the case on summary judgment before trial.

After the jury trial in Jefferson Circuit Court, the jury awarded Burnett $2,268,878.20 and assigned fault 80 percent to Boland-Maloney, 15 percent to Citadel Construction, the general contractor, and 5 percent to Burnett himself. Boland-Maloney's motions for judgment notwithstanding the verdict and for a new trial were denied.

Boland-Maloney appealed, arguing that Burnett needed expert testimony to prove its duty, that it should have been allowed to assign fault to Second Framing, and that several evidence and jury instruction rulings required a new trial. In an opinion issued September 11, 2009, the Kentucky Court of Appeals rejected each argument. It held that the danger of a non-uniform stair riser is apparent even to laypeople, so no expert was needed, and that Second Framing had been found not liable as a matter of law and so could not be blamed at trial.