By Ellen Essman
On August 12, the Ohio Supreme Court released its opinion Camara v. Gill Dairy, L.L.C. The majority opinion was written by Justice Brunner and joined by all of the justices, except for one section that Justice Fischer did not join. The case involves an injury sustained by an employee from equipment on the dairy farm. The case reached the Ohio Supreme Court because the employee, Camara, appealed a decision from Ohio’s Twelfth District Court of Appeals. We covered that decision in an Ag Law Harvest post back in 2023 (available here).
Background
The lawsuit, originally filed in Madison County Court of Common Pleas, alleged that Jose Camara, the employee, suffered severe injuries while operating a piece of machinery called a sand spreader. The Court explains the incident, saying that the sand spreader was connected to a tractor by a power take-off (PTO) shaft, which was equipped with a hydraulic motor that caused the PTO shaft to rotate while in use. However, the safety guards on the PTO shaft were not there on the day Camara was injured in 2019. Camara explained that he observed an oil leak in the sand spreader and first turned the sand spreader off to look for the source of the leak. He could not identify the source of the leak, so he turned the sand spreader on to investigate the matter further. As he looked for the leak, a piece of clothing on his left leg got caught in the unguarded, rotating PTO shaft. The rotation of the PTO shaft pulled Camara toward the machine, then threw him over the shaft to the other side of the tractor. Camara suffered severe and permanent injuries to both legs and his left shoulder, requiring skin grafts and multiple surgeries.
At trial, the jury found the dairy farm liable and ordered it to pay over $1.9 million in damages. Gill Dairy appealed to the Twelfth District Court of Appeals arguing that its failure to repair or replace does not amount to a “deliberate removal” of the safety guards from the PTO shaft and sand spreader, and the appellate court agreed, and vacated and reversed the jury’s judgement. Camara appealed the Twelfth District’s ruling, taking the lawsuit to the Ohio Supreme Court.
Source : osu.edu