Escola v. Coca Cola Bottling Co.

Res ipsa loquitur generally requires that the defendant have exclusive control of the instrumentality and that the accident ordinarily would not occur without the defendant’s negligence. The relevant control, however, can be control at the time of the alleged negligent act rather than physical control at the moment of injury. A bottler cannot avoid the doctrine merely because delivery necessarily places the bottle in someone else’s hands before it is used.

The plaintiff must account for the period after delivery well enough to exclude reasonable intervening causes. She need not eliminate every remote possibility that the bottle was damaged after it left the bottler, but she must offer evidence from which the factfinder can reasonably infer that it was not exposed to harmful outside forces and was handled with due care.

The evidence met that standard. The cases had remained where the driver placed them for at least thirty-six hours, and Escola and another employee testified that the bottle did not strike the case, refrigerator, another bottle, or any other object before it exploded. From this evidence, the jury could reasonably infer that an outside force had not damaged the bottle after delivery.

Once the jury could infer that the bottle was not damaged after delivery, it could infer that the bottle was defective when Coca-Cola relinquished control. Sound bottles containing properly prepared carbonated beverages do not ordinarily explode while being carefully handled in the ordinary course of stocking a refrigerator.

The explosion could have resulted either from excessive internal gas pressure, from a flaw in the glass, or from both. Coca-Cola had exclusive control over charging the bottles. Since an excessive charge ordinarily would not occur without negligence, res ipsa permits an inference of negligence if overpressure caused the explosion.

The same conclusion applied if a glass defect caused the failure. The evidence showed that standard industry testing could identify nonvisible defects with near-infallible reliability in new bottles, while visual inspections could reveal visible flaws. If used bottles could acquire dangerous defects not discoverable through visual inspection, reasonable care required appropriate testing before refilling them; if such testing was not commercially practicable, the bottles should not have been reused. Thus, either a pressure problem or a dangerous bottle defect was a condition that ordinarily would not have existed had the bottler used due care.

Coca-Cola introduced evidence that it regulated and checked bottle pressure carefully and visually inspected bottles at several points in the bottling process. That evidence was relevant to rebut the inference created by res ipsa loquitur, but it did not automatically extinguish the inference.

Ordinarily, when a defendant offers evidence intended to explain an accident or show due care, the jury decides whether that evidence successfully dispels the inference of negligence. The jury was therefore entitled to weigh Coca-Cola’s claimed precautions against the unexplained explosion and the evidence concerning available testing methods. The verdict for Escola was supported by sufficient evidence.