Court Opinion

ID: 9484202
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:43:33.993571+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:04.907598
License: Public Domain

HANSEN, Circuit Judge,
with whom BOWMAN, Circuit Judge, joins, concurring.
Lest anyone believe that the panel’s majority opinion either condoned or implicitly approved the trial judge’s comments and actions which are the focus of the instant dissent’s analysis, a re-reading of the court’s opinion reported at 984 F.2d 261 should dispel any such notion. To begin with, the record revealed that not one objection was made at trial by the plaintiff to any of the trial judge’s comments which are now the focus of attention — not to those now complained of as having been made before the jury nor to those made to counsel out of the jury’s presence. No motion for recusal because of trial judge bias and no motion for mistrial because of prejudicial trial judge comments were ever made. Accordingly, this court’s review proceeded, of necessity, under the rubric of plain error. Despite the plaintiffs failure to be as concerned at trial as on appeal with the trial judge’s statements, the panel majority found Judge Wright’s comments to the jury on the evidence and about the importance of the attorneys’ final arguments to be improper. We further declared that Judge Wright should not have permitted the defendant’s counsel to invite the jury to write a letter to the defendant nor permitted the jury to do so, and we branded defendant’s counsel’s tactics in that respect as highly improper. However, our careful and deliberate study convinced us that no substantial prejudice resulted from *193the improprieties. In effect, the jury in this case returned two unanimous verdicts on liability. One was on the regular verdict form. The second, more akin to a special verdict, was the jury’s additional written statement, signed by each individual juror, which said in pertinent part:
We feel that management is negligent in effectively dealing with personnel problems that arose within the company but we’re unable to find sufficient evidence to support Diane Williams’s claim of racial discrimination by the Fermenta Animal Health Company.
4 Tr. 10-11 (emphasis added).
In substance, while we found the same good cause to criticize the challenged comments of Judge Wright in this case as our dissenting brethren do, and we did so, we did not find the resulting prejudice which would require a reversal and a new trial. In the final analysis, the case must remain styled Williams v. Fermenta, not Williams v. Wright.