Court Opinion

ID: 9479697
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:25:58.814103+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:11.707910
License: Public Domain

GARTH, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I agree with the majority of the court that the district court did not err in allowing the jury to consider Gorniak’s loss of future earning capacity. I disagree with the majority, however, when it permits the district court to use a 15-year period, rather than a 24-year period, to reduce future earning losses to present worth.1
It will be remembered that the jury awarded the plaintiff $104,000 in damages, of which $35,000 was for loss of future earning capacity. Although it is normally the jury which determines the rate and the reduction of future earning damages to present value (see Monessen Southwestern Ry. Co. v. Morgan, 486 U.S. 330, 108 S.Ct. 1837, 100 L.Ed.2d 349 (1988)), the parties in this case agreed to have the district court make that determination. The district court thereupon reduced the loss of the future earning capacity determined by the jury at $35,000 to its present value — $29,-981.69 — based on an agreed discount rate *488of 2% applied to a loss of earnings over 15 years. Had the 24-year term been utilized instead of the 15-year term, the lost earnings capacity claim would have been in the amount of $27,582.77.
While the difference between the two amounts is roughly $2,400, the principle involved is, in my opinion, a much more significant factor. My reason for parting company from the majority is that no evidence appears in the record to warrant the district court’s use of a 15-year period. Rather, in the present case, the evidence of the appropriate term — and the only term evidence — was that Gorniak at age 49 had a life expectancy of an additional 24V2 years. That evidence came from the Life Tables published by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare which are standard tables of mortality. The district court had judicially noticed and received these tables in evidence with respect to the relevant term to be used to reduce future earning losses to present value.
In determining that it would use a 15-year term rather than a 24-year term, the district court rejected Amtrak’s argument that the record revealed no evidence that Gorniak would retire at age 65, the age at which use of a 15-year period would be appropriate. The district court stated in its opinion denying Amtrak’s motion for a new trial or to amend judgment, that:
Although the jury was not asked to specify the number of years on which they based their future earnings award, I find fifteen years to be the most reasonable period for reduction to present value and thus not in error.
I instructed the jury on three distinct categories of damages: loss of earnings, loss of future earning capacity, and pain and suffering. The relevant instruction on future earnings read:
Now, your calculation of what the plaintiff can be reasonably be [sic] expected to lose in future income must be based on the plaintiff’s working life, that is on how long he would have worked but for his injuries. In calculating Mr. Gorniak’s probable working life, you should bear in mind that Mr. Gorniak is now 49 years of age, and you will consider at what age it is reasonable to suppose Mr. Gorniak will retire, since most people stop working at some point before — certainly before they die. Transcript at 136.
The portion of my charge relating to the plaintiff’s twenty-four-year life expectancy was part of the instruction on damages for pain and suffering. I explained that this claim encompassed damages for pain and suffering in the past and future, meaning by future “for the rest of his life.” I then told the jury that plaintiff, who was 49 at the time of trial, had a 24.5 year life expectancy according the United States mortality tables.
The defendant argues that the jury must have calculated damages for future earnings by assuming that plaintiff would continue to work for twenty-four more years until his projected death, rather than for fifteen years until he turned 65. However, the jury instructions explicitly distinguished plaintiff’s working life as something distinct from — and less than — his full life span. It is improbable that the jury would nevertheless assume that plaintiff would work until forced to stop by his projected death at age 73. No evidence suggested plaintiff would work so long.
The fifteen-year figure is based on a round estimate of plaintiffs retirement at age 65. This is a common retirement age familiar to most people. It is also the only age mentioned at trial, although not specifically as evidence, in regard to calculation of plaintiff’s future earnings. When discussing future earnings loss in his closing remarks, plaintiff’s counsel, who had every reason to extend the period for damages, stated: “If for the next 16 years, to, let’s say, age 65 he is able to keep a light-duty job, he’s not going to lose anything in the future.” Transcript of Nov. 6, 1987, at 86. Tilting the ambiguity of the jury’s award to twenty-four years requires a tortured analysis of both our common experience and the trial transcript, (emphasis added.)
App. at 458a-459a.
The majority correctly acknowledges that the plaintiff bears the burden of pro*489ducing evidence from which the jury (in this case, as I have explained above, by the judge) may make a rational reduction to present value of a lost earnings award. DiSabatino v. National R.R. Passenger Corp., 724 F.2d 394 (3d Cir.1984); Russell v. City of Wildwood, 428 F.2d 1176 (3d Cir.1970). In Russell, the need for evidence of the present worth factors was emphasized. We said:
[The defendant] contends that the plaintiff should have supported his claim for the present value of his future losses either by actuarial proof or other evidence from which the jury could have computed the present discounted value of the plaintiff’s future lost earnings in a rational way. Since, says the defendant, the jury did not have before them any such evidence or instruction, their verdict, as to this element of the plaintiffs claim, must have been based on pure conjecture or speculation which rendered the entire verdict invalid.
428 F.2d at 1180. After reciting the defendant’s argument in Russell, we sustained the defendant in his contention. We stated:
Moreover, the amount of future damages warranted by the evidence and the law in a given case is a mathematical fact. There is no logical reason why it should not be established by proof like other relevant facts.
Id. at 1181. Even in those courts where offset damages have been recognized and thereafter discredited by later Supreme Court decisions, see, e.g., Kaczkowski v. Bolubasz, 491 Pa. 561, 421 A.2d 1027 (1980), the plaintiff must introduce evidence of the factors bearing on the present worth of future earning losses. See Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. v. Pfeifer, 462 U.S. at 546, 103 S.Ct. at 2555 (1982). Indeed, in Morgan v. Monessen Southwestern Ry, 489 A.2d 254, 259; 339 Pa.Super. 465 (1985), aff'd 518 A.2d 1171, 513 Pa. 86 (1986), reversed on other grounds, Mones-sen Southwestern Ry Co. v. Morgan, 486 U.S. 330, 108 S.Ct. 1837, 100 L.Ed.2d 349 (1988), the Court stated:
Although appellant submitted a requested instruction concerning reduction of a lost earnings award to present value, and now urges this court to reverse the judgment because the trial judge did not so charge the jury, appellant presented no evidence that would have supported such an instruction. If appellant wanted the trial court to instruct the jury regarding an alternative discount method, evidence relevant to that method should have been offered, (emphasis added.)
In the instant case, the only evidence with respect to present value was the mortality tables which established a 24V2 year life expectancy for Gorniak.
Even the district court must have had doubts about applying a 15-year figure that was not in evidence because it made deliberate mention of the statement made by Gorniak’s attorney in his summation, where the attorney stated that the plaintiff would be able to keep a light-duty job at age 65. I have reproduced that statement above as it appeared in the district court’s opinion.
However, statements made in summation, as the district court itself was careful to acknowledge, are not evidence, nor can we substitute for evidence the inferences drawn in the majority opinion in order to support its affirming decision. In particular, I note that it is only the majority opinion which seeks to support the district court’s decision by post-trial, after-the-fact inferences. Certainly the district court in its own opinion holding a 15-year term appropriate, never relied upon or drew the inferences now supplied for the first time in the majority opinion. And even those inferences, if drawn by the district court, and they were not, could, at the very least, have been countered by just as plausible contrary inferences.2 Nor could the dis*490trict court substitute for competent evidence “its own common sense” (see footnote, maj. op. page 487) in calculating the period to apply in the “present worth” formula.
Moreover, the district court based its calculation not on the inferences found in the majority opinion (maj. op. at 487-88), but rather on the following reasoning. It did so with no evidentiary foundation:
The 15-year figure is based on a round estimate of plaintiffs retirement at age 65. This is a common retirement age familiar to most people.
I suggest that even though the difference in this case between the 24-year and the 15-year present value is not substantial, that we should not depart from such a fundamental, settled and established principle of jurisprudence — that the factfinder’s determinations must be derived from evidence in the record — in order to sustain what is obviously an erroneous result. Present value is determined from the factors that are produced in evidence and the burden rests upon the plaintiff to produce them. In this case, Gorniak did not discharge his burden, and there are no factors to be found in evidence to support the majority’s holdings. As stated, the only factor in evidence was the 24-year factor of the mortality tables.
Thus, rather than affirm the district court on this issue, I would reverse and remand to the district court with the direction that the district court enter a judgment in the amount calculated by application of a 24-year period or $27,582.72, representing the present value of the loss of future earnings. I therefore respectfully dissent.

. In Russell v. City of Wildwood, 428 F.2d 1176, 1180 (3d Cir.1970), present worth was defined as:
... merely a single sum of money which would be sufficient at a specified rate of interest to provide a certain amount of money each year for a specified number of years, and at the end of that time that fund would be entirely exhausted.

. For example, absent evidence of a collective bargaining agreement or pension provisions for retirement at age 65, or testimony from Gorniak as to his own work intentions, it could be inferred that Gorniak would continue working to or after age 70. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), at one time prohibited compulsory retirement of employees before the age of 70. Since October 1986, effective January 1, 1987 (some 22 months before the *490district court’s present worth calculation), the ADEA extended the age ceiling beyond age 70.