Opinion ID: 2621377
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: certiorari was improvidently granted on the statute of limitations issue

Text: ¶8 Against this backdrop, we turn our attention to the first issue on certiorari; the matter of Mr. Hatch's statute of limitations defense to Mr. Davis's claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress. Mr. Hatch took issue with two trial court rulings relating to the statute of limitations. First, he claimed that the trial court improperly denied his motion for summary judgment on the statute of limitations issue. Second, he also contended that the trial court erred when it refused to permit his statute of limitations defense to go to the jury. This is the only statute of limitations issue that concerns us, but it injects an odd wrinkle into our analysis. ¶9 We granted certiorari to answer this question: Did Mr. Hatch waive his right to a jury instruction when he failed to submit for consideration a legally correct instruction? One might read the court of appeals' opinion, perhaps even re-read it, and still wonder where this question came from. The answer is not immediately evident. We will therefore endeavor to chart the route that led to the issue of waiver. ¶10 Mr. Hatch moved for summary judgment on his statute of limitations defense. The trial court denied the motion. [1] Before. the case was submitted to the jury, Mr. Hatch presented a statute of limitations instruction to the trial court. The trial court refused to give the instruction because it believed that there was insufficient evidence to send the statute of limitations issue to the jury. In the words of the court, there is really no legitimate statute of limitations issue. ¶11 The trial court did not, therefore, reject Mr. Hatch's proposed statute of limitations instruction because it failed to properly state the law, but rather because it concluded that Mr. Hatch had failed to mount a sufficient statute of limitations case to merit sending it to the jury. The trial court's decision not to instruct the jury on the statute of limitations was not a ruling on the sufficiency of the contents of Mr. Hatch's proposed instruction but is more accurately characterized as the grant of a directed verdict against Mr. Hatch on his statute of limitations defense. ¶12 The court of appeals appears to have interpreted the events concerning the statute of limitations this way. Its discussion of the statute of limitations never touched on the content of Mr. Hatch's proposed instruction. Instead, the court of appeals examined the record [2] and concluded that it contained facts sufficient to send the statute of limitations issue to the jury. It was on this basis and not on the adequacy of Mr. Hatch's proposed instruction that the court of appeals reversed the trial court. [3] ¶13 Before this court, Mr. Davis has presented the contest over the statute of limitations as a traditional jury instruction skirmish. He claims that Mr. Hatch never properly objected to the trial court's refusal to give his proposed instruction and that he cannot therefore raise his complaint for the first time on appeal. Mr. Davis attempts to bring novelty to what he perceives, incorrectly in our view, as a generic fight over jury instructions by framing the question as: Did Mr. Hatch waive any entitlement he may have had to a jury instruction on the statute of limitations because he failed to offer a legally accurate instruction? ¶14 This question would have appeal to us as an issue of first impression if it arose in a setting where a party objected to the content of an erroneous instruction, where the objection was based on an incorrect statement of law contained in that party's competing instruction. This case presents a much different scenario. As we have noted, the trial court's rejection of Mr. Hatch's statute of limitations instruction was incidental to its grant of a de facto motion for directed. verdict. The legal sufficiency of Mr. Hatch's proposed instruction had little, if anything, to do with either the trial court's ruling or the court of appeals' review of that decision. ¶15 We accordingly conclude that we acted improvidently when we granted certiorari to consider the question of whether Mr. Hatch waived his entitlement to a legally correct instruction and decline to consider it.