Court Opinion

ID: 9657951
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 20:41:55.392796+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:49.747450
License: Public Domain

Robert W. Hansen, J.
(dissenting). The majority opinion is very flattering to the legal profession, very unflattering to the jury system.
*428Flattering to barristers should be the suggestion that, given trial counsel’s indication that he saw the plaintiff on a trailer at a dump, the jury would not believe the sworn testimony of the plaintiff that he did not get up on the trailer, and might then conclude the testimony of the plaintiff as to more material aspects of the case to be unworthy of belief.
Unflattering to jurors is the conclusion that a dispute between lawyer and litigant as to a very peripheral aspect of the case might distract the jury from considering and properly weighing the expert medical testimony on which the plaintiff’s hopes for substantial recovery rested. Jurors are not kindergarten pupils this easily distracted. Jurors are mature and adult citizens, able to discard the irrelevant, particularly where they are admonished by the trial court so to do, and concentrate their attention on the material issues in a case. If they are not, the whole jury system rests upon a shaky foundation.
The objectionable and objected-to statements and questions of defense counsel involved only the question of whether the plaintiff was on or off the trailer at the dump, a matter of remote relevancy. On this phase of the trial, the trial court admonished the jury as follows:
“The Court: The court will instruct the jury as to any remarks made by Mr. Fetzner as to what he saw, are to be entirely disregarded. While counsel has a duty to ask questions, they themselves cannot testify as to facts that they know unless they wish to appear as witnesses. Mr. Fetzner has not at this point in the trial appeared as a witness, but merely as an attorney for the defense. Therefore, any statements that may have been made as in the form of being a witness are to be entirely disregarded.”
Unless court admonitions to disregard are to be held to be invariably ineffectual, this should be held a sufficient erasure of the error, particularly where the trial court then asked plaintiff’s counsel:
“The Court: Is counsel satisfied with the instruction?
*429“Mr. Burns: It’s probably the best that can be done with a bad situation.”
The majority opinion holds that it was not necessary for plaintiff’s attorney to then and there move for a new trial to preserve the right to seek a new trial on the basis of the error committed. Under the holding, given this set of circumstances happening again, it would be prudent not to move for a new trial. Better to leave the depth charge undetonated, so that, if the jury verdict is adverse, a delayed detonation can be used to secure a new trial. However, here the plaintiff’s attorney did not merely fail to make a motion for a new trial.. He clearly accepted the court admonition to the jury to disregard as “the best” of the available alternative means of handling the situation. To impliedly suggest that the trial court should at that point have declared a mistrial would require the court do what neither plaintiff nor defendant requested or desired. Granting the new trial now is to permit plaintiff’s counsel to have his cake — the continuance of the trial at the time of trial — and to eat a different cake — securing a new trial — on appeal.
Out of defense counsel’s closing arguments, the majority opinion also finds error in counsel’s observation that his nine-year-old son, who had testified as to the dump incident, “. . . has two good eyes,” directly followed by his stating, “. . . and I am satisfied, as sure as I am standing in front of you people, that Mr. Lorenz was in that trailer.” The majority opinion relates counsel’s “satisfaction” back to his own presence at the dump when the trailer was being unloaded. It could as easily relate to his parental certainty that his son had told the truth when he was on the witness stand. In either case, the question should be not whether the remark was completely antiseptic but whether it fatally polluted the jury’s consideration of the basic issue in the case. Where the basic issue revolved around and was in the area of the conflicting medical testimony, the writer would hold the remark, even if better left unsaid, not to be so *430prejudicial to plaintiff to warrant or require the granting of a new trial. The central issue here did not relate to the dispute between litigant and lawyer as to what happened at the dump. It related almost solely to the dispute between the doctors who testified as to whether or not there was a linkage between the serious aneurysm condition and the minor traffic accident.
There is neither need nor reason to differ with the majority opinion as to the applicability of rule 19 of the Canon of Professional Ethics, and the thirteen cited cases dealing with it. However, obviously, care and caution should mark the penalizing of a litigant for errors of judgment of his counsel. Disciplinary rules are not most effectively enforced by penalizing clients. On occasion, it will be true that “The lawyer errs, so the client must suffer.” But this should follow only where the error goes to the heart of the issue involved in the litigation or at least is related to highly pertinent and relevant aspects of the case. Being on or off the trailer at the dump is not such.
What the majority opinion does is to move a miniscule factor from the wings to the center of the stage. The plaintiff did not lose his case because the jury believed he got up on or stayed off the trailer at the dump. His case stood up or fell on the matter of the medical testimony presented. The jury found that there was a traffic accident, apportioned the fault and awarded damages to plaintiff for minor injuries therein sustained. It refused to find that his very serious aneurysm troubles were caused or aggravated by the minor accident in which he was involved. This was very much a matter of expert medical testimony and there is ample evidence from medical witnesses to support the jury verdict of non-linkage between aneurysm and accident.
Two treating physicians, Drs. Bourget and Bellormo, testified at the trial. Dr. Bellormo had treated the plaintiff as early as 1961 for fatigue and aching legs. He *431testified as to a history of “occasional occipital-frontal headaches,” and a diagnosis of migraine headaches prior to the accident. Dr. Bourget was visited by the plaintiff four days after the traffic accident here involved. He testified that plaintiff, on the first visit, complained of pains in his neck and lower back, on a second visit of neck pains only. Dr. Bourget testified that the plaintiff made no mention of headaches, and that he had no reason to believe the plaintiff was suffering from an aneurysm.
It is true that another treating physician, neurosurgeon Dr. Merrick, answering a hypothetical question, testified that there could be such causal relationship between accident and aneurysm. However, he had earlier given his opinion in writing to be that:
“It is impossible for me to say with any degree of medical certainty that the accident which he sustained in January of 1963 was the cause of the aneurysm for which I treated him at the Miller Hospital in April of 1963. As I explained to him, the only time I can directly associate such things as an accident and an aneurysm is when there is a severe onset of symptoms, either a neurological deficit or an intercranial hemorrhage, and when the symptoms appear within five minutes after a significant accident which could cause such symptoms. I do not feel that this is the case in Mr. Lorenz’s situation.”
Gallows confessions may be highly persuasive, but courtroom conclusions are not necessarily to be preferred to earlier medical analyses by the same doctor as to a patient’s difficulties and their cause. Given two conflicting diagnoses by the same medical witness, it was for the jury to decide which was to be accepted.
It is likewise true that, where there are differences in the experts’ testimony as to the causation or aggravation of an aneurysm by an accident, it is for the jury to make the decision as to which medical testimony is to be accepted and to decide whether such causation or aggravation was established. Here the jury found that the *432aneurysm had nothing to do with the accident. There is ample medical testimony to sustain such finding.
The written brief on appeal of plaintiff-appellant begins with this statement:
“We do not claim that the evidence was so overwhelming that the jury could not find, as it did, that Lorenz failed to meet the burden of proof that the aneurysm was causally related to the accident.”
The writer agrees.
The failure to meet the burden of proof as to causal relationship came in the area of the medical expert testimony. The jury finding of nonlinkage between aneurysm and accident was not based on accepting or rejecting the testimony of the plaintiff. It was based on the testimony of physicians who had treated the plaintiff and found no connection between the accident and the aneurysm. The case hinged on the testimony of the doctors. It did not hinge on what happened at the dump. There was ample medical evidence to sustain the finding of the jury that the accident and the aneurysm were unrelated. The judgment should be affirmed.
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice Bruce F. Beilfuss concurs in this dissenting opinion.