Court Opinion

ID: 9498837
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:29:34.389273+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:06.313508
License: Public Domain

CARL E. STEWART, Circuit Judge,
with whom KING, HIGGINBOTHAM, WIENER, BENAVIDES, and DENNIS, Circuit Judges,
join dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:
I respectfully dissent from the court’s denial of rehearing en banc in this case in which the panel majority reversed the district court’s denial of Parker Drilling’s motions for judgment as a matter of law and for a new trial, thereby reversing the jury’s grant of maintenance and cure to seaman Brown. Today, the full court countenances the panel majority’s usurpation of the jury’s constitutionally defined role as fact-finder, irreparably harming the jury system in this circuit.
To be clear, the crux of my disagreement with the panel majority is not about what the outcome might have been had I been on the jury, nor about all of the legal *458components of the McCorpen defense.1 Having carefully read the full trial record, my primary disagreement with the panel majority rests on my understanding of the jury’s role as fact-finder and of our limited role as appellate court judges. ‘ Brown, a seaman, alleged he was injured while working on an offshore drilling rig and brought suit against his employer seeking, inter alia, maintenance and cure. Following a three-day jury trial before an experienced trial judge, the jury deliberated for five hours and returned a verdict in favor of Brown on some, but not all of his .claims. Parker Drilling then filed a Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law and a Motion for a New Trial. As I explained in my dissent from the panel’s decision, Brown v. Parker Drilling Offshore Corp., 410 F.3d 166, 184-85 (2005) (Stewart, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part), the district court carefully considered these motions, and, in a. twenty-five page, detailed and lucid opinion, ultimately concluded that there was a legally sufficient basis for a reasonable jury to find in favor of Brown and that the jury’s verdict was not against the great weight of the evidence. Contrary to the intimation of the panel majority, the trial judge was not “asleep at the switch.”
The Seventh Amendment guarantees litigants a right to. a trial by jury and the Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished us not to substitute our judgments for those of the jury, see, e.g., Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242, 255, 106 S.Ct. 2505, 91 L.Ed.2d 202 (1986); Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Prods., Inc., 530 U.S. 133, 151, 120 S.Ct. 2097, 147 L.Ed.2d 105 (2000), yet the panel majority’s decision can only be understood as such. The jury accepted Brown’s version of the events and rejected Parker Drilling’s and, as the district court correctly determined, taken in the light most favorable to Brown, there is sufficient evidence in the record to support the jury’s verdict. Even though Parker Drilling’s counsel more than adequately placed the issue of Brown’s credibility before the jury, the panel majority initially reversed the verdict in favor of Brown concluding that the jury had clearly erred. On panel rehearing, apparently in response to enlightened skepticism, it re-characterized the case as turning on an issue of law, laying the purported reversible error at the feet of the trial judge rather than the jury. But despite the panel majority’s protestations to the contrary, this case remains exactly what it was when the panel first heard it — a vigorously tried case by experienced counsel on both sides before a seasoned trial judge, after which the jury returned a verdict that is (or should be) insulated from appellate fact-finding. And regardless of which chameleonic legalisms the panel majority uses to explain it, the panel majority’s decision remains what it was from the beginning — an audacious exercise in violating the Seventh Amendment.
The panel majority, under the guise of correcting errors of law, usurped the jury’s Seventh Amendment function, replacing the jury’s verdict with a verdict of its own. Brown’s petition for rehearing en banc was not an invitation for the full court to re-try this case for a third time, but an opportunity to correct the lamentable message that the panel majority’s decision sent to the bench and bar throughout the Fifth Circuit — no jury verdict is invulnerable before this court. The panel majority’s decision commandeered the jury’s role as fact-finder and it is principally for this reason *459that I vehemently dissent from the full court’s refusal to rehear this case en banc.

. Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree with Judge Wiener's special concurrence, which thoroughly explains the panel majority’s errors with regard to McCorpen v. Cent. Gulf S.S. Corp., 396 F.2d 547 (5th Cir.1968).