Opinion ID: 610843
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Trial Court Review of the Amount of the Award

Text: 56 As the second stage of scrutiny, a trial court should review the punitive award and record its reasons for upholding or altering it. The trial court can look to the Hammond factors 14 or other general elements of reasonableness to determine whether a punitive damage award should be upheld. The broader picture must not be lost. The task of the court is a comparison between the amount of punitive damages actually assessed and a figure derived from the facts of the case at hand. To arrive at this figure, the court should look to awards in similar cases and to its own experience. If the district court rejects the jury award, it should give the plaintiff the option of a remittitur or a new trial on the punitive damage issue. 15 57 Here, the district court failed to record its reasons for finding the punitive award proper. Several courts dealing with punitives based on state law violations have remanded cases to the district court when they had failed to state the reasons for rejecting a challenge to the award. American Employers Ins. Co., v. Southern Seeding Services, Inc., 931 F.2d 1453, 1458 (11th Cir.1991) (remanding case because district court failed to apply the Hammond criteria and reflect its reasoning for the denial of the motions to alter punitive award); Cole v. Control Data Corp., 947 F.2d 313, 320 (8th Cir.1991) (remanding so the district court could review under the standard articulated in Haslip). 58 Following the lead of these cases, we think it best to remand the punitive award in this case to the district court to analyze it in light of this opinion and to record its reasons for its conclusion. This remand assures that the defendant will have the three stages of Due Process scrutiny endorsed by the Supreme Court in Haslip. 59