Court Opinion

ID: 9579466
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:55:29.367583+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:35:32.080671
License: Public Domain

*672White, C.J.,
dissenting in part.
I would affirm the decision of the trial court.
Any error in admitting Stan Smith’s testimony is harmless. Smith’s methodology is by his own concession unorthodox. The Nebraska Department of Social Services (DSS) points out in its brief that not only is Smith one of the few alleged experts on hedonic damages, but in fact most of the reported decisions on this subject involve Smith and the much-debated value of his opinions. Smith’s analysis applies a quasi-scientific spin to what may seem like a simple issue, which may not be the best method of gauging the value of enjoyment of life.
Nevertheless, the receipt of Smith’s testimony in this case hardly cries out for a remand. At trial, Smith testified that Bridgette Anderson suffered a loss of enjoyment of life in an amount between $2,442,000 and $2,817,000; the trial judge awarded $300,000 in hedonic damages. Smith testified that Candy Anderson suffered losses valued between $1,950,000 and $2,127,000; the trial judge awarded $25,000. The trial judge stated in his written judgment that the court was not bound by Smith’s calculations, noting that Smith’s testimony was no more helpful than the testimony of a physician who stated that an injured person suffers pain more greatly than does the general public.
Although the trial judge did not specify how the final award was calculated or what its numbers represent, Smith’s suggestions seem to have been irrelevant. Thus, any error in admitting Smith’s testimony was harmless. A remand of this cause for the purpose of recalculating a damages award that reflected no influence by Smith is a waste of judicial resources.
Second, the majority uses Smith’s testimony as a vehicle to condemn the concept of damages for the loss of enjoyment of life and to discourage the separation of hedonic damages from damages for pain and suffering. DSS has argued with some success that hedonic damages are too speculative to be measured in calculating a final award to an injured plaintiff. This argument misconstrues the policy prohibiting speculative damages, which is generally directed against uncertainty as to cause rather than uncertainty as to measure or extent. Sherrod v. Berry, 629 F. Supp. 159 (N.D. Ill. 1985). See Calkins v. F *673W. Woolworth Co., 27 F.2d 314 (8th Cir. 1928). Uncertainty which affects merely the measure or extent of the injury suffered is not the sort of “speculative” which bars recovery; rather, it is uncertainty or speculation whether the damages claimed flowed from the defendant’s act that makes damages too uncertain to calculate. Sherrod, supra.
Nothing about hedonic damages is any more speculative or conjectural than the assessment of damages for pain and suffering. To some degree, the fact finder must speculate because it simply cannot experience the plaintiff’s pain in order to make its award precise. When a plaintiff seeks damages for amputation of a leg, the law does not require a jury of amputees in order to prevent speculation as to the value of the plaintiffs pain, nor could the law require a fact finder in this case to have survived a childhood sexual assault. To make the plaintiff whole and to compensate her for each loss caused by the defendant, the law asks the fact finder to speculate, guided by the evidence, both as to palpable pain and as tó the loss of enjoyment of life.
In Nebraska, a person injured by another’s negligence can recover for each element of damages that the evidence shows is reasonably certain to be experienced in the future. Jindra v. S.M.S. Trucking Co., 187 Neb. 502, 192 N.W.2d 139 (1971). I would expand Swiler v. Baker’s Super Market, Inc., 203 Neb. 183 , 277 N.W.2d 697 (1979), to distinguish hedonic damages from damages for pain and suffering and to ease recovery of the former element when warranted by the evidence. Damages for pain and suffering compensate the victim for the physical and mental discomfort caused by the injury; hedonic damages compensate the victim for the limitations on a person’s life created by the injury. Thompson v. National R. R. Passenger Corp., 621 F.2d 814 (6th Cir. 1980). A blanket offering of “pain and suffering” does not accurately address those limitations.
In Fantozzi v. Sandusky Cement, 64 Ohio St. 3d 601, 617, 597 N.E.2d 474, 485-86 (1992), the Ohio Supreme Court adopted an understanding of hedonic damages with which I agree, stating that
[t]he claim of damages for deprivation or impairment of life’s usual activities has, in other jurisdictions, been applied to a wide variety of pleasurable activities shown to *674have been curtailed by the injuries received by the plaintiff. . . . These types of experiences are all positive sensations of pleasure, the loss of which could provide a basis for an award of damages to the plaintiff .... Such proof differs from the elements of mental suffering occasioned by the plaintiff’s injury such as nervousness, grief, shock, anxiety, and so forth. Although the loss of the ability to engage in a usual pleasant activity of life is an emotional experience, it is a loss of a positive experience rather than the infliction of a negative experience.
Absent this distinction in our definition of compensatory damages, the law impedes the trier of fact in making a plaintiff whole in the only way it knows how, which is to give an equivalent in money for each loss suffered. See Thompson, supra.
In his judgment order, the trial judge noted that “[njone of us know what demons dance in the injured mind, but we cannot use that lack of knowledge as the basis for denying compensation for that injury negligently imposed.” To legally ignore the real magnitude of the loss caused by a defendant does not mean that the ignored part has gone away; to legally ignore the fact that living is more painful because of the defendant than it was prior to the injury is fundamentally unfair. So long as Nebraska law prohibits punitive damages, this court should at least see that compensatory damages live up to their name: full compensation for all losses shown by the evidence.
Lanphier, J., joins in this dissent.