Opinion ID: 1979794
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: Motion for Mistrial and Jury Determination of Damages

Text: The defendant's two remaining contentions are that the trial justice abused her discretion when she denied his motion for mistrial after she struck the opinion of Dr. Ferguson and that it was improper to submit the question of damages to the jury after effectively negating the jury's verdict on the issue of liability. The decision whether to grant a motion for mistrial is within the sound discretion of the trial justice. Romano, 78 R.I. at 112-13, 79 A.2d at 766. During the trial, defendant's sole argument to support his motion for a mistrial was that striking his expert's opinion unfairly prejudiced his case. On appeal, he cites Morra for the proposition that a trial justice should grant a continuance to a party after rejecting the testimony of an expert witness in order to provide a fair opportunity to secure another expert. Morra, 791 A.2d at 478 (striking an expert witness' testimony and then denying a brief continuance is reversible error). In this case, however, Dr. Latina did not request a continuance. And, the trial justice explained that the procedural posture of the case provided defendant with fair advance warning that opinion testimony untethered to the standard of care was vulnerable to a motion to strike. Finally, defendant contends that it was error for the trial justice to submit the question of damages to the same jury that had found him not to be negligent, only to have the liability issue subsequently removed from it. Doctor Latina posits that Rule 49 of the Superior Court Rules of Civil Procedure [17] supports this argument and suggests that a New Jersey case, Johnson v. Salem Corp., 97 N.J. 78, 477 A.2d 1246 (1984), does as well. The linchpin of the argument is that submission of the question of damages to the jury was a special interrogatory that asked the jury to render a new verdict inconsistent with its general verdict, something our sister state of New Jersey found to be impermissible. Id. at 1257. We do not believe that the defendant's characterization of the damages question submitted to the jury is accurate. The original general verdict form had two questions on it, [18] one as to the jury's decision on Dr. Latina's liability for negligence and the other asking the jury to determine what damages Franco sustained as a result of that negligence. After she granted judgment as a matter of law in favor of the plaintiff, the trial justice asked the jury to decide the question of what amount of monetary damages Franco sustained as a result of Dr. Latina's negligence. When the jurors expressed confusion about the phrase as a result of defendant's negligence in the damages question, the trial justice explained that they were now to assume that negligence no longer was an issue. The trial justice did not send a special interrogatory to the jurors, but rather asked them to answer a second question that was only slightly amended from that which was on the original general verdict form. We see no merit in Dr. Latina's argument that this was an improper use of special interrogatories. The defendant also argues that the jurors would be motivated to issue a higher than justified damages verdict because they would know that the trial justice had overruled them. This argument is specious at best. Doctor Latina cites no authority for that proposition, and our own research has not uncovered any. We therefore reject the defendant's contention that asking the same jury to determine damages was error.