Opinion ID: 2976832
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Submission of the verdict form

Text: Ford relies on Harvis v. Roadway Express Inc., 923 F.2d 59 (6th Cir. 1991), to support her contention that because the County proposed the special-verdict form that allowed for a finding of municipal liability in the absence of individual liability, “any claimed error after the fact was invited” by the County. In Harvis, this court explained that [t]he doctrine of “invited error” is a branch of the doctrine of waiver by which courts prevent a party from inducing an erroneous ruling and later seeking to profit from the legal consequences of having the ruling set aside. . . . Having induced the court to rely on a particular erroneous proposition of law or fact, a party in the normal case may not at a later stage of the case use the error to set aside the immediate consequences of the error. Id. at 61. No. 07-1062 Ford v. County of Grand Traverse Page 7 The County responds by arguing that the invited-error doctrine is inapplicable because the form used in the present case did not constitute an error in and of itself. Rather, the County contends that it was a perfectly acceptable special-verdict form, but that “[a]fter a finding by the jury that the individual officers’ conduct did not amount to deliberate indifference, the court should have determined as a matter of law that the county was not liable.” The error, according to the County, was not in the jury’s factual findings, but in the district court’s failure to enter judgment for the County as a matter of law based on those findings. We agree with Ford that—in light of the County’s current position (i.e., that municipal liability must always be premised on a constitutional violation by an individual official)—the verdict form should not have been structured in a way that permitted the jury to make findings relating to the liability of the municipality before, and entirely independent of, the findings regarding the individual officials. But we decline to conclude that the County necessarily invited the error complained of as a result of this inartful drafting (and therefore waived its argument relating to the lack of individual liability) because, even if we were to accept Ford’s argument, we would nevertheless be free to consider whether the judgment that resulted from the special-verdict form constituted a plain error. See Reynolds v. Green, 184 F.3d 589, 594 (6th Cir. 1999) (explaining that although “[s]ilence after instructions, including instructions on the form of the verdict to be returned by the jury, typically constitutes a waiver of any objections[,] . . . this court has made an exception to the principle of non-reviewability in cases of plain error” (internal quotation marks omitted)); see also Fryman v. Fed. Crop Ins. Corp., 936 F.2d 244, 251 (6th Cir. 1991) (explaining that because the doctrine of invited error “is a branch of the doctrine of waiver,” appellate courts have discretion to deviate from the rule when “application of the rule would result in a manifest injustice”). In any event, our disposition of Ford’s second waiver argument (discussed below) renders a resolution of this invited-error claim unnecessary. b. The County failed to present its legal theory in its Rule 50(a) motion Ford’s alternative contention is that the County failed to preserve its argument that municipal liability must be premised on an individual employee’s liability by failing to specifically raise the argument in its Rule 50(a) motion. Her argument is based on the well-established proposition that a post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law “is not available at anyone’s request on an issue not brought before the court prior to submission of the case to the jury.” Am. & Foreign Ins. Co. v. Bolt, 106 F.3d 155, 160 (6th Cir. 1997); see also Fed. R. Civ. P. 50(b) (permitting a party to “renew” an earlier “request for judgment as a matter of law”). The Advisory Committee Note to the 2006 Amendment to Rule 50 reiterates this requirement and explains the reasons for it: Because the Rule 50(b) motion is only a renewal of the preverdict motion, it can be granted only on grounds advanced in the preverdict motion. The earlier motion informs the opposing party of the challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence and affords a clear opportunity to provide additional evidence that may be available. The earlier motion also alerts the court to the opportunity to simplify the trial by resolving some issues, or even all issues, without submission to the jury. Limiting the availability of a post-trial judgment as a matter of law also ensures that the plaintiff’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial is adequately protected by “requiring that parties raise important issues before the case is submitted to the jury.” Am. & Foreign Ins. Co., 106 F.3d at 160 (emphasis in original); see also Marshall v. Columbia Lea Reg’l Hosp., 474 F.3d 733, 739 (10th Cir. 2007) (noting that one of the purposes of Rule 50 is to “protect the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury” (alteration and internal quotation marks omitted)); Libbey-Owens-Ford Co. v. No. 07-1062 Ford v. County of Grand Traverse Page 8 Ins. Co. of N. Am., 9 F.3d 422, 426 (6th Cir. 1993) (explaining that a party failing to timely file a motion for a directed verdict is foreclosed from bringing a post-trial motion because “[i]t is too late to complain of the submission of an issue to the jury after a litigant has taken a chance on what the jury will do and after the jury has resolved the issue against him” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Relying on these legal authorities, Ford argues that the County should be barred from claiming that municipal liability cannot attach because at no point before the case was submitted to the jury did the County ever argue that its own liability was contingent on a constitutional violation by an individual jail official. The County responds by contending that its motion for a directed verdict was specific enough to preserve the objection raised in its post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law. On this score the County relies on this court’s decision in Kusens v. Pascal Co., 448 F.3d 349, 361 (6th Cir. 2006), where the court acknowledged that although “[a] post-trial motion for judgment may not advance additional grounds that were not raised in the pre-verdict motion,” a party is not required to state the grounds for judgment with “technical precision.” In Kusens, the employer made an oral motion for judgment as a matter of law at the close of all the proof, arguing that the employee’s wrongful-discharge claim should be dismissed because the employee had failed to argue or even reference the claim during the trial. Id. at 354. The district court denied the motion, but subsequently granted the employer’s post-trial motion in which the employer argued more specifically that the employee’s wrongful-discharge claim under Ohio law must fail because he had failed to plead or prove one of the necessary elements of the claim (i.e., that he was an at-will employee). Id. at 354-55. On appeal, this court rejected the employee’s contention that the employer had failed to raise the issue of at-will employment in its pre-verdict motion. Id. at 362. The court called the issue a “close question,” but explained that [a]lthough Rule 50(a) requires a motion for judgment as a matter of law to state the “specific grounds,” the rule does not define how specific the grounds must be. Because the requirement that a Rule 50(a) motion must precede a Rule 50(b) motion is “harsh in any circumstance,” a Rule 50(a) motion should not be reviewed narrowly but rather in light of the purpose of the rules to secure a just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of the case. Accordingly, where Rule 50(a)’s purpose—i.e., providing notice to the court and opposing counsel of any deficiencies in the opposing party’s case prior to sending it to the jury—has been met, courts usually take a liberal view of what constitutes a pre-verdict motion sufficient to support a post-verdict motion. Id. at 361 (citations omitted). The Kusens court analogized the case before it to the ruling in Rockport Pharmacy, Inc. v. Digital Simplistics, Inc., 53 F.3d 195, 197 (8th Cir. 1995), where the Eighth Circuit concluded, in a tort action, that a defendant’s generalized argument in a preverdict motion to exclude the use of a contractual breach to establish a duty of care was sufficient to preserve its argument in a post-trial motion that state law prohibited tort liability for purely economic losses. In both cases, reasoned the Kusens court, the post-verdict motions elaborated more specifically on “essential element[s]” of the claims that had been raised in the preverdict motions. Kusens, 448 F.3d at 362. The County contends that the rationale of Kusens defeats Ford’s waiver argument. According to the County, the argument that it cannot be held liable because there was no No. 07-1062 Ford v. County of Grand Traverse Page 9 constitutional violation by the individual jail officials is simply a more specific version of its general argument (made in its motion for a directed verdict) that there was insufficient evidence to establish deliberate indifference on behalf of the County. “[L]ike the Defendant in Kusens, Defendant in this case ‘simply restate[d] the identical argument [raised in its pre-verdict motion] in more precise terms.’” (Quoting Kusens, 448 F.3d at 363 (alterations in original).) We are not persuaded by the County’s analogy. True enough, the County’s insufficiency-ofthe-evidence argument should have been adequate to “provid[e] notice to the court and opposing counsel of any deficiencies in [Ford’s] case” with respect to the deliberate-indifference standard. But unlike Kusens and Rockport, where the issues discussed in the post-verdict motions related back to the same legal theory raised in the preverdict motions, the only similarity between the two motions in the present case was that, broadly speaking, both challenged the liability of the County. See Conseco Fin. Servicing Corp. v. N. Am. Mortgage Co., 381 F.3d 811, 821 (8th Cir. 2004) (concluding that the defendant had failed to preserve an argument related to a damages award flowing from a misappropriation-of-trade-secrets claim raised only in a Rule 50(b) motion because such a motion could not be used “as a vehicle to introduce a legal theory not distinctly articulated in its . . . motion for a directed verdict” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Were we to conclude that the County’s preverdict motion in this case constitutes the requisite “specific grounds” for the issue raised in its post-verdict motion, that requirement would as a practical matter cease to provide any limitation at all. Moreover, the trial transcript contains no mention of this legal argument whatsoever, despite the County’s present contention that the legal theory advanced in its post-trial motion is “inextricably intertwined” with the sufficiency-of-the-evidence argument raised at trial. Not only did the County never engage in a colloquy with the district court or opposing counsel on this point, but it also never requested that the jury be instructed that municipal liability was dependent upon a finding that the individual jail officials committed a constitutional violation. See Conseco Fin. Servicing Corp., 381 F.3d at 822 n.7 (concluding that the defendant had developed the legal theory raised in its Rule 50(b) motion only after the jury verdict “because it (1) failed to object to the general-verdict form, (2) offered no jury instructions explaining [the legal theory advanced in its post-verdict motion], and (3) made no substantive objection to the [relevant jury] instruction”). For these reasons, we conclude that the County has waived this argument and we therefore decline to address its merits.