Court Opinion

ID: 9452640
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:46:58.736242+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:17.871153
License: Public Domain

FREEDMAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
As I view it, the requirement that a plaintiff in a civil action must establish the facts essential to his claim by a preponderance of the evidence is not an empty formality, nor is the necessity that the trial judge make this requirement clearly known to the jury a meaningless ritual, notwithstanding the artificiality *431which permeates some of the efforts to describe its substantive meaning. Without such direction a jury of laymen might well believe that by the time a case has reached the stage of a trial in open court the preliminary proceedings at which it can only guess have resulted in placing on the defendant the burden of successfully repelling the claim against it.
Here the question whether an assault occurred was fundamental to the claims of negligence and unseaworthiness. This was recognized in the interrogatories, for consideration of interrogatories 3 and 4 was made conditional on an affirmative answer to interrogatory 1 which inquired whether the assault occurred. Moreover, interrogatory 2, which was also conditional on an affirmative answer to interrogatory 1, inquired whether Faifua hit Lawrence with a sandbag and was essential to the claim of unseaworthiness which was based on Faifua not being of equal disposition to the ordinary man of his calling. Yet neither in the general charge nor in the submission of the interrogatories to the jury was there any instruction that plaintiff had the burden of proving an assault, either a simple one or with a sandbag. If the jury had exercised an acutely discriminating judgment it might perhaps have inferred that there was some difference in the standard it was to use in reaching its answers to the first two interrogatories as distinguished from the last two interrogatories. On the other hand if the jury had no such finely discriminating judgment, I find it difficult to understand how the general instruction on burden of proof of negligence and unseaworthiness could have given it any direction on the standard it was to apply earlier in answering the first two interrogatories relating to the assault.
The fundamental nature of the error is not diminished because the jury answered interrogatories 1 and 2 in the affirmative. I think we are unjustified in projecting on to the jury our own knowledge and consequently assuming that it must have believed that the evidence on these two questions preponderated in favor of the plaintiff. We have no reason to exclude the equally likely surmise that the jury might have thought that the evidence was in balance or even that the defendant had not met a burden which rested on it to show that its own boatswain, Faifua, had not committed the assault. In any event, I think the need to speculate upon this shows the error which the court below committed in rejecting the request that it charge the jury that the plaintiff had the burden of proof of the affirmative of interrogatories 1 and 2.
Moreover, in this case, where special interrogatories were submitted to the jury for its answer, Rule 49(a) requires that “[t]he court shall give to the jury such explanation and instruction concerning the matter thus submitted as may be necessary to enable the jury to make its findings upon each issue.” Since nothing had been said by the court in its general charge on the burden of proof as to the claim of an assault, or an assault with a sandbag, the court in submitting these two interrogatories should have told the jury that the burden of proving the assault or the assault with a sandbag rested upon the plaintiff. The inadequacy in the charge on burden of proof was twice called to the attention of the trial judge, and a specific request was made for an instruction on plaintiff’s burden of proof with regard to the submission of the interrogatories on the assault, but the request was denied.
I believe that the error, called to the attention of the trial judge in accordance with Rule 52, was one which affected the substantial rights of the parties (see Rule 61). I therefore would reverse and award a new trial.
KALODNER, Circuit Judge, joins in this dissent.