Court Opinion

ID: 9779694
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 00:35:43.235892+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:23:22.097818
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE GARMAN, specially concurring: I agree with the plurality that United presented insufficient evidence to warrant a jury instruction that the settling defendants were the sole proximate cause of the accident that resulted in Michael Ready’s death. I write separately, however, to express my continued disagreement with the holding of this court’s decision in Ready v. United/Goedecke Services, Inc., 232 Ill. 2d 369 (2008) (Ready I) that section 2 — 1117 of the Code of Civil Procedure (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1987, ch. 110, par. 2 — 1117) prohibits the jury from apportioning fault to settling defendants. Contrary to the plurality’s holding in that case, section 2 — 1117 unambiguously includes those defendants by providing that “[a]ny defendant whose fault, as determined by the trier of fact, is 25% or greater of the total fault attributable to the plaintiff, the defendants sued by the plaintiff, and any third-party defendants who could have been sued by the plaintiff, shall be jointly and severally liable for all other damages.” (Emphasis added.) Ill. Rev. Stat. 1987, ch. 110, par. 2 — 1117. As I stated in my dissent in Ready I, the plain language of section 2 — 1117 requires that fault must be allocated among all defendants, settling and nonsettling alike. This reading of the statute comports with and furthers the legislature’s “goal of protecting minimally responsible tortfeasors from excessive liability.” Ready, 232 Ill. 2d at 405 (Garman, J., dissenting, joined by Karmeier, J.). The Ready I plurality’s interpretation of the statute rewards settling defendants, no matter the degree of their culpability, and punishes nonsettling defendants. In cases where a defendant may have deep pockets, a plaintiff is encouraged not to settle, knowing that a jury, lacking knowledge of any fault of the settling defendants, may hold the nonsettling defendant solely liable for the injury, absent any comparative negligence on the plaintiffs part. Thus, a nonsettling defendant who may have a lesser degree of fault than the settling defendants ends up paying most of the damages. This is not only unfair to the nonsettling defendant, it may also hurt the plaintiff. If the evidence at trial shows that the only defendant in the case has limited responsibility for the plaintiff’s injury, the jury, faced with the necessity of assigning 100% of the fault to someone, may be tempted to assign greater fault to the plaintiff. In contrast, if a jury is able to consider the fault of settling defendants, a greater share of the fault may be assigned to those defendants and the degree of the plaintiffs fault reduced. In the instant case, the jury found United to be 65% liable for the accident and Michael Ready’s fault was assessed at 35%. If the jury had been allowed to consider the fault of Midwest and BMW, the degree of Michael’s fault may have been reduced because the jury would have had the full picture of the respective liability of all defendants sued by plaintiff. This is not mere speculation. Plaintiff herself apparently believed that BMW had a significant degree of liability for the accident. In her response to BMW’s motion for summary judgment, plaintiff argued that BMW had the responsibility under its contract with United to provide an external crane to lift the trusses. It was undisputed that no crane was provided. Plaintiff argued that had BMW provided the external crane, the accident would not have happened. Whatever the actual degree of fault of BMW and Midwest, the jury should have been able to hear evidence on that issue. That was the only way to properly allocate the damages for the accident. But, because of the plurality’s interpretation of section 2 — 1117, the jury only heard part of the story of what happened on the day of Michael’s death. As I stated in my dissent in Ready I, the plurality’s reading of section 2 — 1117 upsets the balance struck by the legislature between the goals of full compensation for injured plaintiffs and imposition of liability on defendants commensurate with their fault. That erroneous reading of the statute has had and will continue to have unfortunate consequences for both plaintiffs and defendants. JUSTICE KARMEIER joins in this special concurrence.