Court Opinion

ID: 9478329
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:46:37.710443+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:21.403030
License: Public Domain

JERRE S. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I am in full agreement with all those portions of the majority opinion that uphold the damage awards of the district court. I must express my strong opposition to those portions of the opinion requiring a remit-titur of 50% of the damages awarded the husband of the deceased, William Wheat, and her older daughter, Freda Joyce Barlow.
We do not have in this case a “runaway jury”. The ease was decided and the damages were assessed in a trial before the district court itself. The district judge’s *1264judgment is based upon a meticulous and thorough opinion of 59 pages. The opinion captures the flavor of the acute mental distress that all of the parties went through as Mrs. Wheat’s life dwindled away for over four agonizing years as the result of monumental ineptitude on the part of both civilian and military doctors.
The opinion of the district court emphasized the importance of the agonies that the involved persons went through, not to justify punitive damages or to attempt to achieve punitive force to the damages awarded. The opinion for the majority correctly recognizes that punitive motives did not enter into the district court’s calculus. Rather, the purpose of the detail was properly to show the intense mental anguish and suffering of not only the deceased but all of those who were close to her during this time. Here was a woman dying of undiagnosed cancer and in the most intense pain and being told in effect that she was losing her mind, that her pain and other physical symptoms were mental. The majority opinion properly reviews and accepts the flavor of the justification for a high level of damages for mental anguish for all of the parties involved.
The matter of greatest concern to me is the conclusion by the majority that the damages carefully assessed in favor of the named plaintiff, the surviving widower, must be reduced 50% from $1,800,000 to $900,000. The Court points to what it insists is a distortion in awarding $1.8 million to the surviving widower as being far too high when the damages awarded to the estate of decedent, of which it approves, were $3 million.
In requiring this reduction the Court is creating an even more serious and unrealistic distortion. It approves the award of $1 million to Mrs. Wheat’s minor daughter, yet requires Mrs. Wheat’s deceased husband to accept an award of a lesser amount. For two reasons this distortion is unacceptable.
In the first place, while the child was close to her mother and was a minor and undoubtedly had great mental anguish, she did not “participate” in the mental anguish of the family situation to the same extent as did Mr. Wheat, her stepfather. The daughter could not supply the needed solace to an adult woman seriously ill and in great pain who was being told it was all in her mind. It was up to the husband to deal with this anguish day by day. Further, for the last six months of his wife’s life, William Wheat moved her to California for better care, and he moved with her. The younger daughter, in the meantime, had moved back to Arkansas.
If this were a case of terminal illness which all the parties knew and accepted from the beginning, it might be justified to find a greater level of anguish and suffering on the part of a minor child than on the part of a spouse. I am exceedingly doubtful, but this might be justified. But it clearly cannot be justified in a situation where the mental anguish is much more than the acceptance of a terminal illness but consists of the necessity to deal with the wasting away of a human life from rampant cancer while the doctors insist that her troubles were all in her mind. The mental anguish of a husband dealing with and caring for his wife under those circumstances is a far greater level of suffering than just an acceptance of terminal illness. And only the husband can share to the full extent that suffering and the mental anguish in those circumstances.
Second, the distortion is seen to be even greater, however, when it is seen that a substantial part of the damages must consist of the loss of consortium in the case of the husband and the loss of companionship, advice, love, and affection on the part of both the husband and the daughter. The life expectancy of the marriage was around 40 years. The loss in substantial measure of the close companionship, guidance, and advice by the daughter is much more realistically less than ten years. Under the modern definition, adulthood begins at 18 years. The daughter lost only a little over four years as the minor child of the deceased woman. The chances of the daughter being part of the household after that time would decrease rapidly. Certainly in most instances she would have left the *1265home in marriage or in independent living before she was 24.
Yet, we have the spectacle in this case of the Court awarding this daughter more damages for the loss of her mother than are awarded this devoted spouse who actually went through the agonies of his dying wife in a more intimate fashion than any other person could and who had by all evidence an exceedingly happy marriage with the prospect of it lasting as a matter of consortium, close companionship, advice, and love for another 40 years. I cannot aceept $900,000 damages for the surviving widower with $1 million damages, approved by the majority, for the teenage daughter. The $1.8 million award of damages to the widower should stand.
The award of $500,000 for the adult daughter of the deceased is admittedly harder to justify. She had married and left the home. She had a child and then was divorced. She had a great deal of comfort, guidance, and concern from her mother through the difficult times of the divorce. Her mother continued to be close to her, making clothes for her and engaging in other activities which showed a close family tie between them.
The critical point here is that we are not to justify either the $1.8 million or the $500,000 award. As the opinion for the Court properly points out, ours is a far more restricted role. Admittedly, it is a strange anomaly in our law that the findings of fact of the judge without the jury are subject to broader scrutiny by the appellate court than the verdict of a jury.. We apply the clearly erroneous standard in reviewing the decision of a trial before the judge under Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(a).1 This rule also admonishes us, however, to give “due regard ... to the opportunity of the trial court to judge the credibility of the witnesses.”
But in evaluating the district court’s findings of fact under the clearly erroneous standard, there is an additional factor properly taken into account. It is well established that the district court has “great latitude in awarding damages.” Hyde v. Chevron U.S.A., Inc., 697 F.2d 614, 632 (5th Cir.1983). In view of this latitude lodged in the trial court, we must recognize that to set aside the ultimate award of damages we must be willing to say that both of these awards the Court sets aside are so large as to “shock the judicial conscience”. They are so large “as to be contrary to right reason” or so “exaggerated as to indicate ‘bias, passion, prejudice, corruption, or other improper motive’ ”, or as “clearly exceeding that amount that any reasonable man could feel the claimant is entitled to.” I am quoting from the majority opinion’s quotation of the standard we use in evaluating an award of damages as stated in Caldarera v. Eastern Airlines, 705 F.2d 778, 784 (5th Cir.1983). In spite of the “clearly erroneous” rubric on findings of fact, in the ultimate setting of the amount of damages the test “for the determination of whether an award is excessive” has since been confirmed both as to juries and as to the court itself as the test quoted by the court in Caldarera and paraphrased and evaluated immediately above. Wakefield v. United States, 765 F.2d 55, 59 (5th Cir.1985).
In accordance with the carefully considered and thoroughly explained conclusions of the district court as to the amount of damages awarded to all of the participants in this case, including the widower and the older daughter, and in the recognition of the great latitude we honor in a trial court’s awarding of damages, and in the recognition by this Court that Caldarera, as pointed out above, states the test for the determination of whether an award is excessive, I must conclude that the majority is not correct in requiring the remittitur of *1266damages in the case of the widowed husband or the older daughter. We are required to recognize and accept a thorough, careful, and reasonable evaluation of the damages by the district court. We have such an evaluation in this case. I would accept it and affirm its decision in all respects.

. Jury trials are protected from reexamination by the courts of findings of fact because of the requirements of the Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution that "no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States than according to the common law." In United States v. United States Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364, 395, 68 S.Ct. 525, 542, 92 L.Ed. 746 (1948), the Supreme Court said:
Since judicial review of findings of the courts does not have the statutory or constitutional limitations of findings ... by a jury, this Court may reverse findings of fact by a trial court where "clearly erroneous”.