Opinion ID: 1110800
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Gore Guideposts

Text: In Gore, the United States Supreme Court set out three guideposts for courts to look to when reviewing a punitive-damages award. Those guideposts, as most recently restated in State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408, 418, 123 S.Ct. 1513, 1520, 155 L.Ed.2d 585 (2003), are as follows: (1) the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant's misconduct; (2) the disparity between the actual or potential harm suffered by the plaintiff and the punitive damages award; and (3) the difference between the punitive damages awarded by the jury and the civil penalties authorized or imposed in comparable cases. Reprising its criteria for analysis of reprehensibility in Gore, the Campbell Court stated that to determine a defendant's reprehensibility  the most important indicium of the reasonableness of a punitive damages award  a court must consider whether: the harm caused was physical as opposed to economic; the tortious conduct evinced an indifference to or a reckless disregard of the health or safety of others; the target of the conduct had financial vulnerability; the conduct involved repeated actions or was an isolated incident; and the harm resulted from intentional malice, trickery, or deceit, or mere accident. 538 U.S. at 419, 123 S.Ct. at 1521.
Applying the Gore criteria relevant to determining reprehensibility, as restated in Campbell, we note that the harm caused in this case was physical as opposed to economic. As we concluded earlier, Shiv-Ram's tortious omission even minimally to attempt to satisfy its legal duty to the guests at the motel evidenced an indifference to, or a reckless disregard of, the health or safety of others. We have no information from which we can assess whether the motel guests, who would be the target of that total omission, were financially vulnerable. The inaction and omissions by Shiv-Ram involved repeated actions in one sense, inasmuch as they were individually disregarded as to each guest who checked into the motel from the time Shiv-Ram took over the operations of the motel on June 13. The omissions involved repeated inaction in another sense, in that Shiv-Ram knew that its duty to motel guests would fully ripen immediately upon its assuming ownership and management of the motel on June 13, and it knew that the motel had been allowed to deteriorate greatly over the course of several months, yet it consciously elected, throughout the four months it had to inspect and make inquiries, to employ a don't ask, don't tell policy. It knew that it planned a seamless transition and that it would not undertake any inspections or inquiries once it took over the operation and management of the motel. Shiv-Ram was well experienced in the management of motels, yet intentionally refused to expose itself to any information concerning the safety of its guest rooms that might have derailed to any degree the desired seamless transition and the consequent uninterrupted flow of rental income.
Under Gore, 517 U.S. at 575, 116 S.Ct. 1589, and Campbell, 538 U.S. at 419, 123 S.Ct. at 1521, we presume that Linda has been made whole for injuries by the compensatory-damages award, but we do not consider that the ratio between the punitive-damages award and the compensatory-damages award of slightly less than three to one is unreasonable. See AutoZone, 812 So.2d at 1187, approving a ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages of 3.7:1, despite the fact that all of the $75,000 compensatory-damages award in excess of $3,000 necessarily related to mental anguish. (One Justice who dissented from the affirmance of the punitive-damages award would have remitted that award to a level where the ratio to compensatory damages would have been exactly three to one. 812 So.2d at 1188.) Subsequently, in Campbell, the United States Supreme Court observed that, based on prior caselaw, in practice few awards exceeding to a significant degree a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages would satisfy due process and acknowledged that in both Gore and Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. v. Haslip, 499 U.S. 1, 111 S.Ct. 1032, 113 L.Ed.2d 1 (1991), it had approved a 4:1 ratio. Accordingly, we find the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages to be reasonable.
Regarding the third Gore guidepost, a comparison of the punitive-damages award to the civil penalties that could be imposed for comparable misconduct, the parties concede that there is no particular law that would encompass the conduct in this case; thus, this factor is not applicable.
Our analysis of the Gore guideposts, particularly the degree of reprehensibility and the low ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages, persuades us that a $500,000 punitive-damages award is not unreasonable.