Opinion ID: 59493
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Jury instructions and verdict forms

Text: Captain D's argues that the district court gave two erroneous instructions and an erroneous verdict form to the jury. However, Captain D's fails to designate, and we cannot find, any clear or distinct objection to these instructions and verdict form in the record. [44] Thus, we review these claims for plain error only. See Russell v. Plano Bank & Trust, 130 F.3d 715, 721 (5th Cir.1997) (Where the party challenging the district court's instructions has failed to raise the objection before the district court and his position has not been made clear to the court in some other manner, our consideration of the issue is limited to plain error review.). Captain D's contends that the district court: (1) gave a jury instruction on respondeat superior that implicitly allowed the jury to impute to Captain D's the independent, criminal conduct of Harris; (2) failed to instruct the jury that Captain D's only owed a duty to supervise or train if it knew of Harris's propensity for violence or of an atmosphere of violence; and (3) provided the jury with a confusing verdict form. We conclude that the district court did not commit clear error in any of these respects. The district court's instructions did not implicitly inform the jury that it could hold Captain D's vicariously liable for Harris's intentional criminal conduct. The district court instructed the jury only on negligence theories and did not mention Harris's intentional criminal conduct except in respect to the defensive theory of superseding cause. The district court instructed that Captain D's could be held liable for its officers' or employees' negligent failure to train or supervise its employees if the jury determined that the negligence on the part of Captain D's was a proximate cause of injury suffered by Foradori. Then, after giving instructions on proximate cause, the court charged the jury that: if you find from a preponderance of the evidence in this case that the defendant Captain D's LLC was negligent in training and/or supervising its employees, but that an independent and unforeseeable act by a third person, namely an assault on Michael Foradori by Garious Harris, followed defendant's negligent acts and was a substantial factor in causing the plaintiff's injuries, then the defendant is not liable for the injuries proximately resulting from the superseding cause and your verdict should be for the defendant. The district court's instructions also admonished the jurors to consider the instructions as a whole and not to single out one instructions as stating the law. We see no plain error in these instructions. Captain D's is simply mistaken in contending that the district court should have instructed the jury that Captain D's liability hinged upon its knowledge of Harris's propensity for violence or of an atmosphere of violence. As we explained earlier in this opinion, Foradori did not seek to hold Captain D's liable on the theory that it negligently hired or retained Harris because it knew or should have known of Harris's propensity for violence; nor did Foradori base his claim on the theory that there was a preexisting atmosphere of violence in the neighbor of the restaurant. Consequently, jury instructions on those theories would have been irrelevant and perhaps misleading and confusing to the jury. The district court did not plainly err in refusing to give them. Also, the district court addressed and corrected any possible confusion in its verdict form. The form at issue was first written: we, the jury, find that both the plaintiff and the defendant ___ were ___ were not negligent. The jury asked what to do if the verdict was for the plaintiff alone. The court conferred with the parties, admitted that there was a problem, and issued a corrective instruction which both parties agreed to and allowed to be given without objection. There was no plain error in this respect.