Stanley v. Marceaux
991 So. 2d 938 (Fla. 4th DCA 2008)
Plaintiff tenant sued defendants, the owners of her duplex, after a portion of her kitchen ceiling collapsed and fell on her head and shoulder. The jury returned a verdict for the tenant and awarded her $ 194,782.47 in damages. The owners appealed the judgment, contending that the trial court erred in failing to direct a verdict in their favor. The owners asserted that the tenant did not present any evidence to support her allegations of negligent repair of the roof or show a causal connection between the roof repair and her alleged injuries, claiming that the jury could have found liability only by impermissible stacking of inferences. Defendants argued that the jury was invited to infer that the attempted repair of the roof was negligently performed and then stack upon that the further inference that the defective roof repair caused the ceiling in the tenant's unit to collapse weeks later. The verdict could stand only if the first inference, i.e, that the repair was negligently performed, was established to the exclusion of any other reasonable inference. Although it was possible that the roof repair was negligently undertaken, one could also reasonably infer that any later leak had some other cause, such as concealed damage from the two recent hurricanes. Because the first inference was not established to the exclusion of all other reasonable inferences, the trial court should have granted the owners' motion for a directed verdict.