After the jury had returned its verdict, the hospital moved for a remittitur pursuant to Conn. Gen. Stat. It explained that because the jury was not given a comparative fault charge, there was no basis for determining what damages Dr. Chamberlin might have caused in addition to those found by the jury to be the fault of the hospital. As a separate matter, the district court granted the plaintiffs' motion for special prejudgment interest under Conn. Gen. Stat. This statute states that when a defendant refuses to accept a plaintiff's offer to settle that is lower than or equal to the eventual jury verdict, the defendant must pay 12 percent prejudgment interest from the date of the offer. The district judge rejected this contention.
Plaintiffs appeal from the judgment that reduced their jury verdict.
Under Connecticut law a setoff may be employed only when a defendant, against whom a tort judgment has been rendered, requests that the court set off that judgment against a debt owed to the defendant by the plaintiff. In such a case, the defendant must affirmatively spell out and adequately allege its right of setoff in its responsive pleadings. As the hospital made no such claim against the plaintiffs, the setoff doctrine has no application to the case at hand. The hospital nonetheless urges that to say it was improper for the trial judge to grant a setoff is an exercise in semantics because it could have reached the same result by relying on the doctrine of remittitur. It asserts that we may affirm on any ground supported by the record, even one upon which the district court did not rely.