We’ve been defending drug and device litigation for a long time, and we’ve seen many plaintiffs who experienced real injuries. Those of us at the blog, our colleagues at other defense firms, and our clients are genuinely sympathetic to injuries a plaintiff actually experienced. Many plaintiffs we’ve encountered also endured terrible circumstances earlier in their lives. Some of those can be heartbreaking. Defending cases on the basis that our clients’ products did not cause the injury or that the injury was a known and warned of risk doesn’t mean the defense bar looks askance at plaintiffs and their experiences. But, when we see a case involving a syringe needle purportedly propelled into a plaintiff’s derrière, some of us might exhibit a moment of minor moral weakness and include the above title in a blog post. Mea culpa.
Today’s case, Rudzinskas v. Retractable Techs., Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 191860 (S.D. Ga. Sept. 29, 2025), involves a type of syringe that automatically retracts once the plunger handle is fully depressed. Plaintiff’s husband regularly administered vitamin B-12 shots to her and had been doing so for six or seven years. Plaintiff claimed that, on one of those occasions, the needle from defendant’s syringe “shot into [her] like a slingshot.” Id. at *4. Plaintiff went to the hospital and an ultrasound suggested the needle was embedded in the plaintiff’s buttock. Plaintiff underwent surgery to have the needle removed, but the surgeon was not able to extract it.
Plaintiff claimed that, two moths later, her husband administered another shot to her using the same type of needle (this time in her arm) and that the needle “shot through her arm and lodged under her skin.” Id. at *5. An x-ray did not show the presence of a needle in plaintiff’s arm, and she did not undergo any attempted surgery to remove the needle.
During discovery plaintiff produced the syringes that she claimed dislodged needles into her buttock and arm. But all of the syringes the plaintiff produced contained their needles. Upon learning this, plaintiff claimed she inadvertently produced the wrong syringes and that she could not locate the syringes missing their two needles.
The defendant produced a corporate witness who testified that the syringes were manufactured in a way that places no forward force on the syringe, so it would “defy physics” for a needle from the syringe to shoot forward into the plaintiff’s body. Id. at *7. Plaintiff produced a report from a physician expert who opined that there were two needles from defendant’s syringes imbedded in the plaintiff. The physician admitted he had never seen an instance where the needle lodged in a patient rather than retracting. Plaintiff stipulated that her physician expert was not an expert in manufacturing or design.
On defendant’s motion for summary judgment, the court first addressed the plaintiff’s negligent manufacturing claim. Defendant argued that the plaintiff could not prevail on her claim because she did not produce the syringes and she did not offer expert testimony about any negligent manufacturing. Under Georgia law, expert testimony is required to support a manufacturing claim unless “an average juror would know from the alleged incident alone that a product deviated from its specifications.” Id. at *14. The court agreed with the defendant that the inner workings and manufacturing of the retractable syringe were beyond the understanding of lay jurors, so expert testimony was required. Without it, summary judgment was appropriate.
The court also held that summary judgment should be granted even if plaintiff did not have to produce expert evidence. In cases where expert testimony is not required, plaintiff could rely on circumstantial evidence provided a reasonable jury would find that a manufacturing defect was the most likely cause of the incident. Since there was no evidence that any other of defendant’s syringes ever exhibited the alleged defect, the plaintiff did not produce the syringes in question, and the defendant provided testimony that it would “defy physics” for the incidents to have occurred as plaintiff claimed, the court held that plaintiff’s claim could not survive summary judgment even under the lesser standard.
The court then turned to plaintiff’s remaining claim that the defendant should have warned purchasers of the “potential danger of the product.” Id. at *23. Defendant argued the claim was entirely derivative of plaintiff’s manufacturing defect theories. Holding that the failure to warn claim was predicated on the allegation that the syringes contained a manufacturing defect, the court agreed with defendant and granted summary judgment. Guess that’s a shot in the, um, arm for the defense?