Federal Jury Awards $5.6 Million to Indianapolis Worker Who Lost Four Fingers in Unguarded Roller

In October 2007, Ronald Hargis was at Flutes Inc., a corrugated paper plant on Zionsville Road in Indianapolis, testing new production equipment. His left hand was caught in a compression conveyor, a machine that squeezes sheets between stacked rollers. The rollers took four of his fingers. Over the following years he went through about a dozen surgeries.

Hargis and his wife, Amy, sued, and the case was removed to federal court in Indianapolis. The conveyor had been designed by AJ Engineering, the trade name of Wellspeak Enterprises, Inc., a company based in New Bern, North Carolina, as part of a corrugated paper production line. The case also named Kohler Coating, which designed the gluing machine that fed the conveyor, and Flutes later joined as an intervening defendant. The couple's claim against AJ Engineering was a design defect: the intake rollers had no guard, and a guard would have kept a worker's hand out of the nip point.

Mike Phelps of the Ken Nunn Law Office in Bloomington tried the case for the Hargises before Chief Judge Richard L. Young. No dispositive motions were filed before trial, and the case went to a jury. The testimony turned on the machine itself. Herbert Kohler, president of Kohler Coating, spoke from his years in the corrugated paper industry about how machines with two stacked rollers are normally built. James Wellspeak, who designed the conveyor, also testified at length.

The trial ended March 30, 2012. The jury returned a verdict of $5.6 million for the Hargises against AJ Engineering and found that they should recover nothing from Kohler Coating. The newspaper account of the verdict reported that Hargis had turned down a settlement offer before trial and chose to put the case to the jury.

AJ Engineering then asked the court to overturn the result. It argued that a design defect claim could not succeed without a formally designated expert witness, and that Kohler's testimony should be treated as lay opinion. In an entry dated August 1, 2012, Judge Young disagreed. He ruled that Indiana law does not require expert testimony in every design defect case, and that Kohler had in fact given expert opinions based on his industry experience, to which AJ Engineering had not objected when he gave them. The court denied the motion for judgment as a matter of law, the alternative motion for a new trial, and the motion to alter or amend the judgment, noting that the company offered no argument for why the amount was excessive.