Court Opinion

ID: 9703042
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:37:50.720639+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:45.069973
License: Public Domain

O’HERN, J.,
dissenting.
We would affirm the judgment below as to Doctors Tischler and Boss essentially for the reasons stated in the majority opinion of the Appellate Division published at 206 N.J.Super. 987 (1985). We add further only that we believe the only way to avoid a “manifest denial of justice under the law,” Dolson v. Anastasia, 55 N.J. 2, 7 (1969), is to grant a new trial as to all parties. By permitting the ease to go to the jury as to Doctor Blackwood, the trial court, in effect, quite unintentionally created an unreal scenario. The jury was permitted to consider the case on the proposition that there was sufficient evidence before it to find that any member of the operating team was liable for the malpractice that has left Walter Whitfield with a permanently-disabled left arm.
The facts are set forth in the Appellate Division opinion. We perceive that the only way that the jury could have returned a verdict in favor of plaintiff was to find that someone on the *506operating team committed professional error that was a proximate cause of the plaintiffs loss of function in his arm. The theory of plaintiffs case was that one or more members of the team failed to exercise the degree of care expected of them as medical professionals either by (1) not detecting the severed nerve, or (2) actually cutting it in the course of treating the underlying gunshot wound. Because this was an emergency situation, plaintiff had no prior professional relationship with any of the doctors. The actual surgery was performed by Doctors Boss and Tischler. Boss was the surgeon of record; he held the instruments, did most of the cutting, and prepared the post-operative report. Tischler was responsible for the completeness of the report. Doctor Blackwood was presented to the jury as the attendant physician and the senior member of the operating team since he was no longer in residency. He described his participation as follows:
As far as I can remember in this case I did not scrub in the operation and that in general is deliberate on my part. And again, I think in a way you have to understand the training programs in this country for the last hundred or one hundred fifty years have been based on a system of graduated experience. People, the most junior people do the things that they can do and as they gain more experience they do more things.
So those on the attending staff deliberately do not participate. What I tell the team is that I won’t scrub up on the case unless you ask or unless I think you should have asked me. And I do that deliberately so I will get an impression of whether they think they are in trouble or not and that sort of thing. And for an operation like this with the abdomen part was a negative exploration except for ligation of some bleeding vessels, I am certain that I did not scrub.
[Emphasis added.]
Thus, Dr. Blackwood expressed his supervisory responsibility in terms of stepping in when he thought it necessary.
At the time of the Whitfield operation, Boss was a senior resident in his fourth year of general surgery. He explained that Blackwood was the chief doctor on the team. In performing certain preoperative tests on Whitfield, the doctors discovered that Whitfield could not oppose his left thumb and pinky. Such a test result indicates injury to the median nerve. A preoperative note made by Boss was signed by both Boss and *507Blackwood. The note indicated that the surgeons should check for damage to the blood vessels of the arms and look for any blood clots. It also indicated the possibility of a median nerve injury.
Thus it was not irrational for the jury to have believed that it might conclude that the chief doctor on the team, who was supposed to resolve issues of supervision even when not asked, may have been the cause of the error and the injury by not directing the junior members of the team to take the necessary steps to find or restore the damaged nerve.
The jury was led to believe that it could ascribe the requisite failure to detect or avoid severing the nerve to one or more members of the operating team. As noted by the Appellate Division, the jury attributed this responsibility to Doctor Black-wood.
Of course, we agree that we are not faced here with inconsistent verdicts mandating a new trial. See Brendel v. Public Serv. Elec, and Gas Co., 28 N.J.Super. 500, 507 (App.Div.1953) (“* * * inconsistent and irreconcilable verdicts are fatally defective and should normally be set aside”). But our appellate review is not exhausted by determining that the verdicts can be reconciled. When there is no special deference due to the trial court’s view of credibility, or demeanor or other feel of the case not transmitted by the written record, an appellate court must review the matter to determine whether “it clearly appears that there was a miscarriage of justice under the law.” Dolson v. Anastasia, supra, 55 N.J. at 7 (now the test of Rule 4:49-l(a)). We are convinced that the jury’s verdict was the result of mistake as to the appropriate legal standards under which it was to decide the entire controversy.
While we are trained to accept the nuances of judgment n.o.v. practice, we doubt that conscientious jurors would find much meaning in the hollow recognition accorded to their verdict by the majority’s decision. We have always emphasized that juries must not be misled about the legal effect of their deliberations. *508Roman v. Mitchell, 82 N.J. 336, 346-47 (1980). Just recently, we restated our commitment to this principle in remanding for a new trial a complex case involving multi-party liability in an aircraft accident dramshop setting:
The parties should he permitted to present their cases in the context of what the law is * * * rather than as the trial court misunderstood the law to be. In proceeding as it did here, the court created a “make believe” scenario, the legal equivalent of half a deck. Accordingly, the cases must go back for trial * * *.
[Buckley v. Pirolo, 101 N.J. 68, 79 (1985).]
Since a retrial limited just to Doctors Boss and Tischler may involve new evidence, it may present a jury with another incomplete view of the legal responsibilities of the parties, just as the trial court’s submission of Doctor Blackwood’s liability presented the jury with a “make-believe scenario.” Hence we believe that the only just resolution is to resubmit the entire matter in the context of what the law is. If there is no evidence upon which to base Doctor Blackwood’s liability, the jury should not be misled by having that issue submitted to it.
For affirmance — Justices CLIFFORD, POLLOCK, GARIBALDI and STEIN — 4.
For reversal —Chief Justice WILENTZ, and Justices HANDLER and O’HERN — 3.