A federal appellate court has refused to dismiss a jury verdict that exonerated Bic USA Inc. in a case involving a 3-year-old child who was severely burned by a lighter whose child-resistant guard had been removed.

Three-year-old “CAP,” as he is identified in the litigation, found a lighter manufactured by Shelton, Conn.-based Bic on the floor of his father's truck in December 2004 and used it to loosen a button on his shirt, which caught fire, leading to flames that engulfed him from the waist up.

The boy spent three weeks in a hospital, where he was treated for second- and third-degree burns to his face and chest and underwent several skin graft surgeries, according to Wednesday's ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati in David R. Cummins v. Bic USA Inc. et al.

The boy's father “denied the lighter belonged to him, but acknowledged he usually bought Bic lighters and customarily removed their child-resistant guards to make them easier to use,” according to the ruling.

A jury trial in U.S. District Court in Bowling Green, Ky., began in January 2012 on charges that Bic and the other defendant had violated Kentucky's Consumer Protection Act and the federal Consumer Product Safety Rule.

After a nine-day trial, a jury deliberated for two hours before finding that Bic had not knowingly or willfully violated the Consumer Product Safety Rule, and that the lighter was not defective and “unreasonably dangerous in a way that was a substantial factor” in causing the boy's injuries.

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The plaintiff moved for a new trial on the basis that the court had erred in allowing Bic to introduce evidence of the Consumer Safety Product Safety Commission's failure to take action concerning the lighter.

He also charged the court had erred in permitting Bic's counsel to argue the parents were to blame for his injuries, and refusing to instruct the jury to disregard such arguments. “Plaintiff argued that these two errors combined to mislead the jury and deny him a fair trial,” said the appellate ruling.

A unanimous three-judge panel rejected both of the plaintiff's arguments. “In ruling on the admissibility of the evidence, the district court used the correct legal standard,” said the ruling. “The court is not shown to have committed a clear error in applying it. Nor has plaintiff shown that admission of the evidence — the accuracy of which is not contested — contributed to a 'seriously erroneous result.'”

On the issue of blaming the parents for the accident, the appellate court said when Bic's defense attorney criticized the boy's father during his closing argument, the court had interrupted and admonished him and directed the jury to disregard the offending reference. The defense attorney's argument “could have been made more discreetly than it was,” said the ruling, but he was “duly chastened on his indiscretion by the district court.”

“In fact, the district court's sudden interruption of counsel's argument midstream, to scold him in a sidebar and contemporaneously admonish the jury to disregard the inappropriate remark, was arguably more effective than a reiteration of the standard final instruction that lawyer's arguments are not evidence,” said the appellate court in denying the motion for a new trial.