Opinion ID: 563774
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: resubmission to the jury

Text: 81 We set the stage. When the jury first returned, it indicated, in answering Question No. 3, that Mongillo acted with Western Surety's apparent authority; yet it rendered a verdict against Mongillo alone. 11 FRG urged the court to enter judgment against Western Surety on the basis of the jury's answers to the special questions. The court rejected this suggestion, instead bringing the jury into the courtroom and explaining that there was an inconsistency between the verdict and the answers. The jury resumed deliberations, armed with pristine replicas of the special questions and verdict slips. After approximately fifteen minutes, the jury again returned. Its answers to all the special questions were identical, with one exception. The exception--answering Questions No. 3 and 4a in the negative, rather than in the affirmative--remedied the inconsistency. The jury again rendered a verdict in favor of FRG alone, against Mongillo alone, in the amount of $2,300,000. 82 Fed.R.Civ.P. 49(b) supplies the mechanism whereby a trial court can ask a jury not only to return a general verdict, but also to answer written interrogatories upon one or more issues of fact the decision of which is necessary to [the] verdict. Id. If the jury returns an inconsistent work product, then: 83 When the answers are consistent with each other but one or more is inconsistent with the general verdict, judgment may be entered ... in accordance with the answers, notwithstanding the general verdict, or the court may return the jury for further consideration of its answers and verdict or may order a new trial. 84 Fed.R.Civ.P. 49(b). In this case, FRG asserts that the trial court erred in selecting the second option and resubmitting the matter to the jury. The assertion rests on three separate pillars. All are wobbly. 85 FRG first contends that the jury's original answer to the apparent authority queries was not inconsistent with the general verdict (which found in favor of FRG against Mongillo). Because an explicit verdict for or against Western Surety was not returned originally by the jury, FRG urges us to rule that the magistrate should have seized upon the first Rule 49(b) option, discharged the jury at that point, and resolved the fate of Western Surety in line with the answers alone. 86 FRG's point is little more than semantic gamesmanship, rooted in a faulty premise. The verdict form is part of the Appendix. It provided two individual spaces for the jury to list which defendants it found liable. The court told the jury: [F]or the defendants, you may find ... one or both. If you find just against [one], you cross off the other. When it first returned, the jury named Mongillo alone as the party against whom the damage award would run. We think it is perfectly clear that, by inserting Mongillo's name in one space on the verdict form and drawing a line through the other, the jury found in favor of Western Surety. To cite the maxim: expressio unius est excludio alterius. Moreover, if there was room for doubt, we believe that the trial court should be granted substantial latitude in determining whether or not the jury's response to a verdict form which the court prepared is clear and free from ambiguity. See Richard v. Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., 853 F.2d 1258, 1260 (5th Cir.1988) (discussing trial court's leeway in deciding whether jury's answers to special questions are inconsistent), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 1042, 109 S.Ct. 868, 102 L.Ed.2d 992 (1989). Thus, we uphold the magistrate's ruling that the general verdict was inconsistent with the special answers regarding the existence of apparent authority. 87 In light of this conflict, and in pursuance of Rule 49(b), the court had its choice from among a trio of alternatives. The trier's discretion as to which procedural route should be traversed is not unbridled, but it is deserving of considerable respect on appeal. See Diamond Shamrock Corp. v. Zinke & Trumbo, Ltd., 791 F.2d 1416, 1423 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1007, 107 S.Ct. 647, 93 L.Ed.2d 702 (1986); Phillips Chemical Co. v. Hulbert, 301 F.2d 747, 751 (5th Cir.1962). Moreover, a trial court's exercise of its discretion in selecting a course of procedure from among the three options listed in Rule 49(b) must be judged on the entirety of the circumstances which obtained when the perceived inconsistency arose. Phillips, 301 F.2d at 751. 88 In this instance, the court convincingly explained the reasons for resubmitting the matter to the jury in its post-trial memorandum. 12 Under the circumstances, to argue that the magistrate abused his discretion or coerced the jurors by outlining the problem and asking them to deliberate further is to engage in pettifoggery. See, e.g., Richard, 853 F.2d at 1259-61 (discussing breadth of trial judge's discretion upon finding of inconsistency). 89 FRG's second argument boils down to the notion that the magistrate mishandled the matter because, in reinstructing the jury that a finding of apparent authority required a general verdict against Western Surety, he improperly suggested that the jury was free to ignore the law and tailor its factual findings to suit its own ideas of justice. To bolster this argument, FRG cites several cases in which appellate courts disapproved of a trial court's interjection of a supplemental instruction which delineated the consequences of the jury's original findings. See, e.g., Perricone v. Kansas City Ry. Co., 704 F.2d 1376, 1378-79 (5th Cir.1983); Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Ry. Co. v. Speth, 404 F.2d 291, 295 (8th Cir.1968); Phillips, 301 F.2d at 750-51. The common teaching of these cases is that 90 a jury must be totally immune from any possible coercion or subtle pressures to increase or decrease [or change] its decided verdict by reason of the court's interrogation and direction to reconsider its findings. 91 Speth, 404 F.2d at 295. 92 We find these cases unhelpful. In each of them, the appellate court took exception to the trial court's supplemental instruction on the meaning of the verdict; that is, in each of them, the jury was returned to the jury room for further deliberations after receiving new information. See Perricone, 704 F.2d at 1378; Speth, 404 F.2d at 293-94; Phillips, 301 F.2d at 750-51. In the case at bar, the jury was not told anything of substance that had not already been elucidated in the original charge. To the contrary, the magistrate had told the jury all along that a finding of apparent authority would render Western Surety liable. His reiteration of this instruction after the inconsistency emerged was, in our view, well within the scope of his discretion. It strains the reality of human experience to read into this carefully worded reinstruction an implicit dispensation to disregard those facts that did not mesh with the jury's notion of a just result. 93 FRG's last argument is a subset of the preceding argument. FRG contends that the jury's abrupt change in its findings anent apparent authority demonstrates that it disregarded the law in order to accomplish its desired result. To support this contention, FRG relies on Riley v. K Mart Corp., 864 F.2d 1049 (3d Cir.1988). We think that Riley is a horse of a vastly different hue. 94 In Riley, a slip-and-fall case, the jury initially found in answer to special questions that plaintiff was 70% negligent, defendant was 30% negligent, and plaintiff suffered $250,000 in damages. Because the applicable law did not allow plaintiffs who were more than 50% negligent to recover, the court explained that to the jurors and asked them to clarify the inconsistency between their negligence findings and their damage award. The jury then found plaintiff 49.9% negligent and fixed his damages at $150,000. The Third Circuit reversed the district court's acceptance of the second verdict, ruling that there was little question but that the jury impermissibly tailored its findings to support the desired end result. The panel wrote: 95 While a court will not ordinarily inquire into a jury's thought processes, where it becomes obvious that a jury has disregarded the duties assigned it to the extent that its factual findings are but a means to a result a court need not blind itself to that all too apparent reality. 96 Id. at 1054. 97 The case at hand lacks the trappings of transparent contrivance that festooned the Riley case. Here, the jury's original work product contained a single, direct inconsistency, which it resolved in a forthright manner, devoid of fancy footwork; its reconsidered decision that Mongillo acted without apparent authority does not smack of the heedless manipulation which leaps off the printed page in the Third Circuit's rendition of Riley. 13 98 Nor is this argument substantially fortified by the celerity with which the jury dispatched the second set of papers. No matter how complicated the case, brevity in jury deliberations is not, in itself, a basis for scuttling a verdict. See Marx v. Hartford Accident & Indem. Co., 321 F.2d 70, 71 (5th Cir.1963) (per curiam) (jury deliberated for fourteen minutes); Segars v. Atlantic Coast Line R.R. Co., 286 F.2d 767, 770 (4th Cir.1961) (jury deliberated for four minutes); Cuthbertson v. Clark Equip. Co., 448 A.2d 315, 316-17 (Me.1982) (jury deliberated for sixteen minutes after eight-day trial wherein seventy exhibits were introduced and judge's charge ran forty pages). Courts cannot hold a stopwatch over a deliberating jury. Rather, the jury's work product must tell the tale. If the answers to special questions, and the verdict itself, are consistent with the weight of the evidence, and no other red flags are flying, the rapidity or languor with which the jury acts is an irrelevance.