Court Opinion

ID: 9709577
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 03:51:37.395314+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:50.316105
License: Public Domain

CARTER, Justice
(dissenting).
Although I agree that the court of appeals wrongly concluded that the Thavenets could not object to Davis’s counsel reading into evidence certain answers from Bradley Swyers’ deposition, this does not aid .the Tha-venets in establishing error by the .trial court. The only objection that the Thaven-ets’ .trial counsel lodged to the Thavenets’ offer of Swyers’ deposition answers was the following:
BY THAVENETS’ COUNSEL: Your Honor, Mr. Swyers was asked as a trucking expert to act as an accident reconstruc-tionist and decide why the-why the accident took place and he did so in answer to an interrogatory. And while we were in deposition I asked, him about his-his interrogatory answer and J asked him what he meant by certain legal terms, one of them being sudden emergency. And I-I think that he was acting outside of his area of expertise as a trucking expert when he decided that-when he used the legal term sudden emergency in his answer to interrogatories and that’s why we want to read that in.
The district court’s response was
I’m going to permit the reading of those and if you are going to be-if you are going to be submitting his testimony I’m going to permit those questions and answers.... Sudden emergency is a matter we kicked around here a little bit and when I was doing the proposed instructions I even toyed with the idea of taking out the word sudden, coming up with another adjective, but it’s a plain English term and I guess I fail to see the harm in using it in this testimony.
The deposition answer by the witness Swyers to which the objections of Thavenets’ counsel related was as follows:
Q. All right. Now, I’ve looked at the answer to your interrogatory, and in part of it you say that the Wilcox/Roadrunner truck jackknifed, creating a sudden emergency for Mr. Davis. I wonder if you *238would define for me how you are using the term “sudden emergency.” A. Because when he started to jackknife, the vehicle that was in front of Mr. Davis started to slow very rapid-or started to slow down very rapidly, which means Mr. Davis had to react to that very rapidly.
I agree with the district court that this answer was not the statement of a legal conclusion but rather a description of events using plain English. Consequently, I disagree with the conclusions in the majority opinion that the district court was required to rule favorably on the only objection that the Thavenets’ counsel made to the reading of the Swyers’ deposition answers by Davis’s counsel.
The challenged ruling did not result in an improper admission of evidence. No portion of the Swyers’ deposition was offered in evidence, so the challenged ruling was of no legal consequence. The situation is somewhat similar to that in which a pretrial ruling is made in a criminal case that, if defendant testifies, certain evidence may be admitted as impeachment. If the defendant fails to testify, the challenged impeachment evidence is never used. In refusing to posit error on such a pretrial evidentiary ruling, this court has stated that the issue thus arising is theoretical rather than actual. State v. Davis, 328 N.W.2d 301, 306-07 (Iowa 1982).
In the present case, the Thavenets have not extended their legal argument to matters other than questioning whether the district court’s evidentiary ruling was correct. They do not assert how, if it was not correct, this served to prejudice them. The appellee, Davis, describes this failure as follows:
The jury did not even hear Swyers’ opinions, which the Thavenets are complaining were inadmissible. The prejudice, if any, that would have been caused by the trial court’s ruling is rehabilitated by the Tha-venets’ intervening decision to not read the Swyers’ deposition. The Thavenets have not even argued that they were prejudiced by the fact that the jury was not allowed to hear, based on their own decision, the portion of Swyers’ deposition which the Tha-venets believe was admissible. The Tha-venets cannot make such an argument as almost all of the remaining testimony from Swyers’ deposition was heard by the jury from other witnesses at trial, such as the Thavenets’ trucking expert, Mr. Neal.
Because the Thavenets fail to assert in their written argument the manner in which they were prejudiced by the district court’s evidentiary ruling on Davis’s use of Swyers’ deposition, they should be deemed to have waived any claim of prejudice. See Iowa R.App. P. 14(b)(3) (failure to state, argue, or cite authority in support of an issue may be deemed waiver of that issue); Genetzky v. Iowa State Univ., 480 N.W.2d 858, 861 (Iowa 1992) (appellant who made no argument to support an issue waived that issue).
If we do the Thavenets’ work for them by searching the record ourselves, the only favorable answer that Swyers gave with respect to the Thavenets’ litigating position was the following:
Q. Could you be a little more specific with respect to that phrase? A. Well, in-in Mr. Davis’s testimony or in his deposition that he’s got here, you know, he was talking about following thirty to forty feet, running at I got approximately forty-five miles per hour. You know, at that speed following that close behind a vehicle was not giving him enough room for his stopping distance to actually be able to safely stop....
As the appellee urges in its brief, however, this opinion was cumulative of the testimony given by the Thavenets’ own expert witness, Jay Neal.
The overturning of a jury verdict in a five-day civil trial and requiring that the case be tried anew should not be lightly undertaken. Any prejudice claimed by the Thavenets in the present case as a result of the district court’s rulings concerning admissibility of portions of Swyers’ deposition is far too speculative to warrant such action in the present case. I would affirm the judgment of the district court.
McGIVERIN, C.J., and HARRIS, J., join this dissent.