Crown Equipment Built a Dangerous Forklift. A Worker Was Hurt. No One Faced Any Accountability.

EvilCorporations.com • SC101091 • Missouri Supreme Court, February 24, 2026 • 11 min read

The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Cost Christopher Hanshaw

The court documents in this case reduce Christopher Hanshaw to a procedural problem. He is a paragraph in a motion. He is an appellant with an inadmissible expert. He is the losing party in a summary judgment proceeding. The opinion, all ten pages of it, never describes what actually happened to his body on August 25, 2016. It never names the warehouse, the shift, the load he was carrying, or the direction he was traveling when the forklift’s open compartment became the reason he would spend years in court.

What we know is this: a man got into a machine that Crown Equipment designed, manufactured, and put into the world. That machine had no door. It had no bumper. It had an open operator compartment that left the person inside exposed to whatever was coming. Crown Equipment knew this design existed. They built it that way. And when that design contributed to Christopher Hanshaw getting hurt, Crown Equipment’s legal team didn’t dispute the injury. They never had to. They attacked the messenger instead.

For nearly ten years, Hanshaw lived in the machinery of litigation. He found an expert. He gathered Crown Equipment’s own accident data. He pulled OSHA records. He had his expert inspect the forklift, visit the accident site, build models, review video footage, and analyze comparable designs. He built a case. And then the company he was suing asked a judge to decide that none of that expert’s work counted as real methodology, and the judge agreed.

The gap between what happened to Hanshaw and what the law says he deserved is not a technicality. It is the architecture of a system designed to make injured workers run a legal gauntlet that most cannot finish. His expert’s CV wasn’t enough. His peer-reviewed papers weren’t submitted in the right format. His safety analyses weren’t described with sufficient procedural specificity. The PowerPoint presentation his expert prepared as a source document was not in the legal file when it needed to be. Every failure was Hanshaw’s failure, by the time the court got done accounting for it.

Crown Equipment faced no jury. No punitive damages. No public reckoning over what its internal accident reports said about how often its open-compartment forklifts hurt people. The company that built the machine, sold the machine, and collected the profit from the machine paid nothing. The worker who got hurt inside it spent almost a decade trying to prove that mattered, and the courts told him he hadn’t proved it correctly.

Legal Receipts: What the Court Documents Actually Say

The Missouri Supreme Court’s opinion in SC101091 is a procedural ruling, but embedded in its procedural logic are admissions and findings that tell the full story of how this case was won and lost.

“Crown Equipment argued the expert is not qualified, his opinions are not based on reliable methodology, and his deposition testimony ‘amount[s] to nothing more than rank speculation and inadmissible ipse dixit.'”

• This is Crown Equipment’s lawyers characterizing the opposing expert’s entire body of work as “rank speculation.” The term “ipse dixit” means “he said it himself” with no supporting proof. This framing was accepted by two courts and is now the official legal record.
• The court’s adoption of this framing meant the entire question of whether the forklift was defectively designed was removed from consideration before a single juror ever heard a word of evidence.

“The circuit court specifically noted no evidence was presented that the expert performed any tests – e.g., testing for injury potential, economic feasibility, or general safety – to support the efficacy of his alternative designs or that his alternative design was the subject of any peer review.”

• The expert did claim to have performed testing, including performance testing of forklifts, collision speed testing, egress time evaluation, and testing of horizontal instruction protection. The problem was that the methodology and conclusions of those tests were never formally submitted to the circuit court in admissible form.
• This is not proof that the expert did no work. It is proof that the work was not properly documented and submitted inside the procedural requirements of Missouri Rule 74.04. The distinction matters enormously to a court and almost nothing to an injured worker.

“Hanshaw also argued the expert’s opinion was based on reports maintained by Crown Equipment and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (‘OSHA’) regarding forklift accidents. The circuit court found the expert again failed to demonstrate how he used the data, how the data supported his opinions, and that the data resulted from reliable research methods.”

• Crown Equipment maintained its own internal accident reports on forklift injuries. Those reports existed. Hanshaw’s expert reviewed them. The court’s ruling does not dispute the data’s existence; it rules only that the expert’s use of that data was not explained with enough methodological specificity.
• OSHA also maintained records of forklift accidents. The same ruling applies. The harm documented in those records never reached a jury because the bridge between the data and the expert’s opinion was procedurally inadequate.

“The expert’s affidavit also suggests he prepared, and attached as an exhibit, a PowerPoint presentation ‘to detail the primary opinions [he] will offer along with some of the source material upon which [he] relied.’ Such PowerPoint is not in the legal file.”

• This is perhaps the most damaging single sentence in the entire ruling. The expert himself referenced a presentation meant to explain his methodology and source material. That document was never in the court record.
• Whether this was a filing failure by Hanshaw’s legal team, a document processing error, or something else is not addressed in the opinion. The result is that a key piece of the expert’s documented work simply does not exist in the official record of the case.

“Hanshaw argues genuine issues of material fact exist regarding whether Crown Equipment acted with complete indifference or conscious disregard for the safety of forklift operators.”

• This sentence is in the opinion because Hanshaw specifically argued Crown Equipment knew its open-compartment design was dangerous and chose to keep it anyway. That is the legal definition of “conscious disregard for safety.”
• The court never ruled on whether that allegation was true. It ruled only that because the underlying defect claim failed first, the punitive damages claim automatically failed with it. The question of what Crown Equipment knew and when it knew it was never answered in a courtroom.

What Crown Equipment’s Design Implied vs. What the Record Shows

Societal Impact Mapping: The Cost That Never Shows Up in a Court Ruling

Public Health

Forklift injuries are a documented, recurring public health crisis in American workplaces, and the design choices of manufacturers like Crown Equipment sit at the center of it.

• OSHA maintains accident records specifically tracking forklift operator injuries. Those records were relevant enough to Hanshaw’s case that his expert reviewed them, but the contents of those records were never presented to a jury because of how the expert’s methodology was structured.
• Crown Equipment maintained its own internal accident data on forklift incidents involving its machines. The existence of that data demonstrates the company had access to information about the injury risk profile of its open-compartment designs. What that data showed, and whether it informed design decisions, was never adjudicated.
• Open operator compartments in stand-up forklifts expose workers to crush injuries, ejection injuries, and contact with obstacles in warehouse and distribution environments. The specific argument in this case was that a door or bumper, standard design features available to manufacturers, could reduce that exposure. That argument was removed from the court’s consideration, leaving the design question unanswered in law.
• When injured workers cannot get their cases in front of a jury because of procedural expert exclusions, the legal system produces no public record of a manufacturer’s safety practices. Corporations retain internal data on injuries their products cause without ever being required to answer for it in a damages verdict.

Economic Inequality

The outcome of Hanshaw v. Crown Equipment is a precise illustration of how procedural complexity in expert witness law functions as a structural barrier for working-class plaintiffs.

• Christopher Hanshaw was an hourly forklift operator. Crown Equipment Corporation is a major national manufacturer. The resources each party can dedicate to litigation preparation, expert documentation, and procedural compliance are not remotely comparable.
• The case was lost not because Hanshaw’s expert lacked knowledge or credentials, but because the formal procedural bridge between the expert’s work and the court’s evidentiary standards was not built correctly. Building that bridge properly requires experienced, expensive legal support that working-class plaintiffs frequently cannot access.
• Discovery closed before Hanshaw could correct the expert’s exclusion. The court noted this itself: “it was too late for Hanshaw to endorse a new expert or cure the defects with his current expert.” One procedural failure became permanent and unappealable.
• The punitive damages claim, which would have forced Crown Equipment to account for what its internal records showed about operator safety, was automatically extinguished once the liability claim failed. The company’s conduct was never examined on the merits.
• Crown Equipment walked away from a case involving its own machine, its own accident data, and a documented worker injury without paying a dollar in compensation, legal penalty, or punitive sanction. The financial asymmetry between a large manufacturer and an injured worker was reproduced and reinforced by the legal process that was supposed to correct it.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric: Crown Equipment’s Bill for Injuring Christopher Hanshaw

Compare that $0 verdict against what Hanshaw carried: nearly ten years of litigation, an injury that brought him to the legal system in the first place, and a final ruling from the state’s highest court confirming he would receive nothing. The legal system’s final accounting of this situation is that Crown Equipment’s open-compartment forklift design has no established dollar value of harm attached to it in any Missouri court record.

What Now: How to Pressure the Companies and Agencies That Let This Happen

The Hanshaw ruling is final, but the questions it leaves open, about what Crown Equipment knew, what its accident data showed, and whether its open-compartment forklift design continues to injure workers, are not. These are the organizations with the authority and mandate to pursue those questions.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies With Jurisdiction

• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration): OSHA maintains forklift accident records and sets federal safety standards for powered industrial trucks. OSHA has authority to inspect Crown Equipment’s manufacturing facilities and to investigate whether the open-compartment design of its forklifts meets existing safety standards under 29 CFR 1910.178.
• CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission): While OSHA covers workplace machinery, the CPSC maintains oversight over product safety reporting. Companies with documented injury data related to product design can face CPSC scrutiny over failure to report.
• DOJ (Department of Justice): If Crown Equipment’s internal accident data shows the company had evidence of a defect and concealed it, that raises potential consumer protection fraud questions at the federal level.
• State Attorneys General: Missouri’s Attorney General has consumer protection authority. Workers in other states injured by Crown Equipment forklifts with open-compartment designs may trigger multi-state AG interest if a pattern of harm is documented.

Key Corporate Roles at Crown Equipment Corporation

• The [REDACTED – Not in Source: CEO/President of Crown Equipment Corporation] holds executive responsibility for design safety decisions at Crown Equipment.
• The [REDACTED – Not in Source: Vice President of Engineering] is the corporate officer responsible for forklift design specifications, including the open-compartment design at issue in this case.
• The [REDACTED – Not in Source: Crown Equipment Board of Directors] bears fiduciary responsibility for the company’s litigation strategy and any decisions to maintain a design despite documented operator injuries.

Grassroots Resistance and Mutual Aid

• If you operate a forklift at work: Request the make and model of your equipment from your employer and look up whether your specific Crown Equipment forklift model has an open operator compartment. Document your workplace’s safety training materials related to that design.
• If you or someone you know was injured on a Crown Equipment forklift: File a report with OSHA at osha.gov. Those reports build the public record that regulators and future plaintiffs need. The case against Crown Equipment failed in part because internal data was not presented at trial. Public OSHA records cannot be kept out of court the same way.
• Support warehouse worker unions and safety organizing: Workers in distribution centers who are represented by unions have collective bargaining rights over workplace safety equipment, including the right to demand guards, doors, and protective structures on powered industrial equipment. Organizations like the Teamsters and UFCW have active warehouse safety programs. Connect with them.
• Follow the product liability docket: Check PACER (federal court records) and your state’s online court system for any additional cases involving Crown Equipment forklift injuries. Pattern evidence across multiple cases is what makes regulatory and legislative action possible.
• Contact your state legislators: Missouri and other states can pass legislation requiring forklift manufacturers to publicly report operator injury data, similar to vehicle safety recall reporting requirements under federal auto safety law. That kind of mandatory transparency is the structural fix this case exposes the need for.