Court Opinion

ID: 9729572
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:43:01.44649+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:59.715590
License: Public Domain

O’Hara, J.
{dissenting). In this case we construe a court rule. We adopted it. It reads: (OCR 1963, 505.2)
“Separate Trials. The court in furtherance of convenience or to avoid prejudice may order a separate trial of any claim, cross-claim, counterclaim, or third-party claim, or of any separate issue or of any number of claims, cross-claims, counterclaims, third-party claims, or issues.”
An able and experienced trial judge opined:
“The file before the court indicates serious physical injuries and personal damages; extensive testimony will be required properly to establish these elements, and yet the time and effort so expended will avail nothing, if the jui’y finds no liability. Of more importance, however, is the fact that if there is liability, plaintiff is entitled to an award commensurate with his loss; if there is no liability, not only should defendant have to pay nothing but he should not be put to the time and expense of defending the damage issue. The probability of obtaining this desired result is far greater if liability is tried first and separate from the damage issue.”
Our decision here seems to me to be of critical import to the circuit bench of our State. The rule expressly states “the court [the trial court] in furtherance of convenience or to avoid prejudice may order a separate trial.” This rule vests the discre*236tion of when and under what circumstances to invoke it in the trial judge. To reverse him, we must if we are not to vitiate the rule completely, find he has abused that discretion. Are we prepared to say as precedent here that Judge Quinn was guilty of an abuse of his discretion? If so, on what basis? He .presided at the pretrial, he had the pleadings before him, he had the pulse of the case. To reverse him for the reasons assigned by Justices Souris and Black is to say that the exercise of the trial bench’s judgment in the application of this rule, must comport with our discretion, not his. Judge Quinn has in nowise denied plaintiff his right of trial by jury. He ordered separate trials on liability and damage because in his judgment and for the reasons he stated so to do served the rule-stated purposes of “convenience” and the avoidance of “prejudice.” How do we upon review here say such an order serves neither “convenience” nor avoids “prejudice?” If any rule of review in our jurisprudence is settled, iterated and reiterated, it is that we do not reverse a trial judge in the exercise of his discretion, absent a palpable abuse thereof.
If we here abandon this position; if we here construe the involved rule to mean the burden is upon the trial judge to justify the exercise of his discretion in this application of a procedural rule, one way or the other, we disregard a fundamental precept in the relationship between the trial and appellate court. Whatever our personal philosophy may be insofar as this rule is concerned, it is still a rule of practice no different from any other. I do not apprehend why Mr. Justice Souris 'finds the provisions of this rule “extraordinary.” Nothing in the rule itself nor the commentaries thereunder so classify it. Better we repeal or amend the rule to embody our philosophy than to denominate the rule “extraordinary.”
*237In simple substance despite what my conferees have written so forcefully and persuasively, I cannot see that the trial judge did anything except precisely what the rule authorizes him to do and assigned his rule-contained reasons therefor. Under such circumstances I am impelled to vote to deny the writ. I would award no costs.
Dethmers and Kelly, JJ., concurred with O’Hara, J.
Adams, J., took no part in the decision of this case.