Court Opinion

ID: 9805044
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 17:30:24.064575+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:30:22.310664
License: Public Domain

Gonzalez, P.J.,
dissents in a memorandum as follows: I would find the court’s denial of plaintiffs motion to preclude defendant’s expert from testifying as to a new hypothesis first introduced mid-trial — that decedent had a sudden, lethal cardiac event — reversible error, and I would remand for a new trial on pain and suffering.
The decedent was being treated by defendant hospital for bi*428lateral bronchopneumonia. As of mid-trial, both parties’ actions and submissions were consistent with the medical examiner’s autopsy report finding that the decedent died of that pneumonia, a death necessarily accompanied by pain and suffering attendant to the patient’s eventual suffocation.
A few days into the trial, however, Dr. Mukherji, one of the emergency room doctors who triaged the decedent and treated his bronchopneumonia for approximately 12 hours (while the patient was on a continuous heart monitor), testified on cross-examination that the 44-year-old decedent likely had a lethal heart attack in the middle of the night, after having been transferred from the emergency room to a general medicine floor.
Meanwhile, the continuous telemetry monitoring that took place throughout the 12 hours the decedent spent under Dr. Mukherji’s care showed no evidence of any arrhythmia. This doctor was a fact witness; he was not called as an expert. Notably, at his deposition, two months before trial, Dr. Mukherji testified that he could not give an opinion as to how the patient died.
Having been alerted to the new theory by Dr. Mukherji’s trial testimony, plaintiff moved to preclude Dr. Silberman, defendant’s expert, from opining as to the cause of decedent’s death. I disagree with the majority that this objection was untimely. There was no basis for this specific objection to have been raised in response to the CPLR 3101 (d) exchange, since no one had hypothesized that the decedent died of a heart attack.
Plaintiff could not have anticipated this entirely new theory as to the cause of the decedent’s death before hearing Dr. Mukherji’s testimony, and plaintiff was certainly prejudiced by defendant’s expert testimony, as evidenced by the jury verdict of $0 for pain and suffering. In my view, disallowing a motion to limit expert testimony by excluding a new theory revealed for the first time at trial would eviscerate the procedural protection that CPLR 3101 (d) was drafted to create. Accordingly, I would vacate the pain and suffering award and remand the matter for a trial on that issue (Green v William Penn Life Ins. Co. of N.Y., 74 AD3d 570, 575 [1st Dept 2010]; Lissak v Cerabona, 10 AD3d 308 [1st Dept 2004]).
Under our interest of justice jurisdiction, I would also find that the court erred in precluding plaintiff’s economist from testifying as to projected lost earnings. Plaintiff was entitled to recover “for the pecuniary injuries resulting from the decedent’s death” (EPTL 5-4.3 [a]), the calculation of which rests within the jury’s province (see Parilis v Feinstein, 49 NY2d 984 [1980]). *429In addition to the losses attributable to household services provided to plaintiff by the decedent, plaintiff’s unrefuted testimony concerning the close relationship she had with her son and his biweekly financial contributions to her, which she claims would likely have continued, are subject to consideration by a jury in determining her future economic losses, even in the absence of supporting documentation (Zelizo v Ullah, 2 AD3d 273 [1st Dept 2003]; Abruzzo v City of New York, 233 AD2d 278 [2d Dept 1996]).