Opinion ID: 2403365
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 18

Heading: Request for new trial based on excessiveness of damage award

Text: As part of their challenge to the district court's exemplary damage award, the WideBand defendants also argue that reasonable persons could infer that, due to the excessiveness of the district court's damage award, the trial of this matter, as well as the civil processes preceding and following it, were tainted by prejudice and other improper influences and that, consequently, the judgment should be reversed. Id. at 45. In support, the WideBand defendants argue that [t]he record, from start to finish, is replete with procedural irregularities that would lead a reasonable person to believe that the resulting verdictwhich nearly exceeded four million dollarswas solely the product of passion and prejudice. Id. at 46. For example, they note, during closing arguments, ClearOne's counsel averred, in open court (and while gesturing towards ... Chiang and Yang) that if the jury found in favor of [the WideBand defendants], hundreds of local jobs would be lost. Id. Nevertheless, they assert, the Trial Judge neither admonished nor sanctioned counsel for making this statement, despite its inflammatory nature, and ultimately concluded, in response to Defendants' reference to this incident in their Motion for New Trial,... that th[e] action was harmless. Id. The problem was compounded, defendants argue, by a Trial Court which made statements to the effect that (a) it already considered the WideBand Defendants guilty prior to trial and (b) would do all it could to assist ClearOne in `collecting' its judgment. Id. Although the WideBand defendants do not identify precisely what district court ruling they are appealing, a review of the record on appeal indicates that these same arguments, in nearly identically worded form, were asserted by Lonny Bowers in a pro se motion for new trial filed on March 12, 2009. The district court rejected that motion as both premature and lack[ing] merit. JA at D17565. More specifically, the district court held that the damages award [wa]s supported by the evidence. Id. at D17566. To the extent [that Lonny] Bowers relie[d] on the court's adverse rulings as evidence of lack of impartiality, the district court concluded, he [failed to] establish[] bias.... Id. As for judicial statements [Lonny Bowers] contend[ed] were prejudicial, such statements, the district court held, were not made during trial and so could not have influenced the jury. Id. Lastly, the district court held that any allegedly inappropriate statement made by [ClearOne's] counsel during closing argument was harmless. Id. We review for abuse of discretion the district court's denial of a motion for new trial on the grounds of excessive damages. Fitzgerald v. Mountain States Tel. & Tel. Co., 68 F.3d 1257, 1261 (10th Cir. 1995). Absent an award so excessive ... as to shock the judicial conscience and to raise an irresistible inference that passion, prejudice, corruption or other improper cause invaded the trial, we will not grant relief. Hardeman v. City of Albuquerque, 377 F.3d 1106, 1121 (10th Cir.2004). After reviewing the record on appeal, including the trial transcript, we conclude that the district court's exemplary damage awards were not so excessive as to shock the judicial conscience or to raise an irresistible inference that the awards were the result of passion or prejudice. Indeed, as we have already noted, the jury found that each of the WideBand defendants acted willfully and maliciously in misappropriating ClearOne's trade secret, and the district court reasonably took this into account in determining the amount of punitive damages to impose. Further, we conclude that the purported procedural irregularities cited by the WideBand defendants are baseless. For example, in alleging that ClearOne's counsel made improper statements during closing arguments, the WideBand defendants failed to cite in their appellate brief where in the record on appeal those statements were purportedly made, and our own review of the trial transcript failed to substantiate the allegation. Following our inquiry at oral argument about these purported statements, the WideBand defendants filed a letter pursuant to Fed. R.App. 28(j) citing a page in the trial transcript in which ClearOne's counsel, following the return of the jury's findings in favor of ClearOne on its claims for misappropriation, made arguments to the jury in support of ClearOne's request for punitive damages. Contrary to the WideBand defendants' assertions in their appellate brief, ClearOne's counsel neither gestured towards the individual WideBand defendants [9] nor argued that if the jury found in favor of [the WideBand defendants], hundreds of local jobs would be lost. Aplt. Br. at 46. Moreover, the WideBand defendants' counsel made no objection at trial to the arguments now cited in the WideBand defendants' Rule 28(j) letter.