Court Opinion

ID: 9455275
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:17:20.949535+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:31.757734
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Chief Judge
(concurring) .
I concur in the result and all of the opinion. I would add this only by way of emphasis.
Here a retrial of a long, tedious, hard-fought case is avoided from the confidence that the error in the new and intervening cause issue was harmless. But we can demonstrate its harmlessness only because of the special interrogatories, one of which categorically found that the railroad had been guilty of willful wanton negligence proximately causing injuries and death.
Had that finding not been expressly made we would have been faced with the enigma wrapped in a mystery — the un-revealing general verdict. Never could one, whether man or Judge, divine what subsidiary holdings had led the jury to the general verdict for the plaintiffs. Was it contributory negligence of the decedent? Willful wanton negligence by the railroad in (i) the initial impact, (ii) the continuing injury from failure to discover and stop or (iii) both? Was it new and intervening cause? And on one or more of these possibilities, were damages apportioned as between (i) or (ii) or (iii) ?
Worse, the absolute inability of anyone to penetrate this fog would have forced the law to one of its most incongruous fictions — the inescapable assumption that the jury followed only the wrong instruction (new and independent cause).
What this means is that the wonderful device of special interrogatories with a general charge (F.R.Civ.P. 49(a))1 enables both trial and appellate Courts to know precisely what has been found. And here in refutation of occasional *981misguided laments from the plaintiffs’ bar the device proves the neutrality of its effect and operation. It can hurt but it can help. Really, it should do neither —it simply, but categorically, reflects the jury’s assessment of the truth.
The tool is indeed the doubt eliminator. Brown, Federal Special Verdicts: The Doubt Eliminator, in Proceedings of the Annual Judicial Conference, Tenth Judicial Circuit of the United States, 44 F.R.D. 245 at 338 (1967).2

. Here it was actually under 49(b), a tricky procedure of many pitfalls which were avoided by the jury’s being consistent in its general verdict and the answers to the interrogatories determined by us to be decisively significant.

. I am happy to have the company of a leading authority on practice and procedure, Dean Charles Joiner, who said recently : “All persons interested in preserving the jury as a finder of fact should support the use of the special verdicts.” C. W. Joiner, July Trials — Improved Procedures, 48 F.R.D. 79, 86 (1970).