## Facts

- Monterey P. Morgen rode unbelted in the rear passenger-side seat of a 1984 Ford Escort station wagon.
- The Escort, stopped at an intersection, was rear-ended by a Honda Accord and pushed into a vehicle ahead, causing substantial rear damage.
- Morgen suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury and became quadriplegic.
- Morgen sued Ford Motor Company in strict products liability, alleging the Escort was defectively designed and unreasonably dangerous.
- Morgen’s experts attributed the injury to upward deformation of the rear seat that reduced occupant survival space and caused roof contact, and they asserted a structural weakness.
- Ford denied defect and contended the injury resulted from the kinematics of an unbelted occupant in a rear-end collision (seatback compression/recline, ramping, and neck flexion), supported by crash-testing evidence.
- Ford asserted a statutory defense of product misuse based on Morgen’s failure to wear the rear-seat belt.

## Issues

1. Whether, under Indiana’s Product Liability Act, the trial court erred by instructing the jury that product misuse could be a defense where the alleged misuse was failure to wear a seat belt.
2. If the misuse instruction was erroneous, whether it prejudiced Morgen and required a new trial.

## Decision

- The Indiana Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and affirmed judgment for Ford.
- The Court held the product-misuse instruction was not erroneous; seat-belt nonuse is not categorically excluded from the statutory misuse defense.
- The Court held that, even assuming the instruction was improper, any error was harmless because the verdict was supportable on independent grounds (lack of defect and/or causation).

## Legal Principles

- Under the Indiana Product Liability Act, product misuse is a statutory defense when the misuse proximately causes injury and was not reasonably expected at the time of sale.
- Whether conduct constitutes “misuse,” including nonuse of a safety feature, may be a case-specific question for the jury rather than a per se rule controlled solely by generalized foreseeability.
- An allegedly improper jury instruction warrants reversal only if it affected the verdict; where the record supports the verdict on defect and causation independent of the challenged instruction, the error is harmless.

## Conclusion

The court upheld a jury instruction allowing Ford to argue statutory product misuse based on seat-belt nonuse and, in any event, found no reversible prejudice because the jury could reasonably reject Morgen’s defect and causation proof regardless of the misuse theory.


Morgen v. Ford Motor Co., 797 N.E.2d 1146 (Ind. 2003)