Court Opinion

ID: 9671441
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:36:39.905215+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:09.414857
License: Public Domain

W. J. Giovan, J.
(concurring in part and dissenting in part). I concur in the court’s opinion, except that part which rejects the defendants’ request for a judgment not withstanding the verdict regarding the award of lost earning capacity to the plaintiff for the entirety of his life expectancy.
The jury’s verdict includes an award for future lost earning capacity, measured by lost wages,1 from the date of trial to the year 2021, the last year of his life expectancy at age seventy-three.
The majority opinion concedes that a person’s working life does not ordinarily extend until death and that there is no evidence in the record that supports an inference that the plaintiff would have worked beyond normal retirement age, but nevertheless declines, on two grounds, to give relief to the defendants: (1) the defendants did not object to the court’s instruction concerning plaintiff’s life expectancy and, (2) the defendants offered no evidence of their own that the plaintiff would not have worked beyond normal retirement age.
*50The Court says that, for want of an objection, the plaintiff should receive, and the defendant should pay, damages that will never exist. But the rationale for precluding relief where there is no objection does not exist in this instance. The rationale, of course, is that a retrial should not be required when a timely objection would have provided the opportunity to correct the error. In this instance, however, damages were not rendered in a general verdict, and the offending part of the jury’s award can be identified with one hundred percent accuracy from the special verdict form, thus making a retrial unnecessary in order to achieve a just result.
In the end, however, it is unnecessary to discuss whether an objection was required to preserve the issue because defendants could not have properly objected to the instruction on life expectancy in any event. The evidence clearly permitted a finding that some effects of plaintiff’s injury were permanent, and the court was therefore obliged to instruct on plaintiff’s life expectancy in order to allow for an appropriate award of future damages. The defendants waived nothing by failing to object to an instruction, the omission of which would have constituted error.
The Court’s second justification for tolerating the windfall to the plaintiff and the penalty to the defendants is that the defendants did not prove that the plaintiff would not have worked beyond normal retirement age. That, of course, is a direct reversal of the allocation of the burden of proof, which is always assigned, by both law and logic, to the one who asserts the affirmative of a proposition. McIntire v Carr, 171 Mich 647, 651; 137 NW 811 (1912); Dolph v Lake Shore & M S R Co, 149 Mich 278, 281; 112 NW *51981 (1907). The Court’s ruling says, in effect, that a defendant who does not prove that a plaintiff would not have worked beyond normal retirement age, even in the absence of evidence to the contrary, stands liable to be assessed for lost wages until the day that the plaintiff is projected to draw his last breath.
I would remand for remittitur of the amount awarded to the plaintiff for future lost wages beyond the age of sixty-five years.

 That the award was based on projected lost wages is clear from the question on the verdict form which generated that part of the award that is in issue:
Question Number 3: If you find that the Plaintiff Dick Scott will sustain wage loss damages in the future, give the total amount for each year in which the Plaintiff will sustain damages.