Court Opinion

ID: 9844902
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:11:33.333683+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:15:46.950594
License: Public Domain

BAKES, Chief Justice,
concurring specially:
I concur in Parts II, III, IV and V. I concur in the result in Part I dealing with punitive damages. Judge Ward conducted the original trial and was the only judge to observe the demeanor of the witnesses. He denied the award of punitive damages. On appeal, the case was reversed in part and remanded for further proceedings. However, Judge Ward had died, and the case was assigned to a new district judge who, without hearing any new evidence on the punitive damages issue, reviewed the original trial transcript and came to a different conclusion. We have before us the same written record which the district court on remand had before it. That record demonstrates that PBS created the ledger cards in question, and further that there was no express provision in the contract requiring PBS to deliver those cards to MVRA at the time of the termination of the contract. Any such requirement was, at best, implied, just as was MVRA’s obligation to pay PBS the $10,539.52 which the district court on remand held was owing from MVRA to PBS on its counterclaim, and which the Court today affirms in Part V.
While the evidence in this case makes a slightly better showing for the imposition of punitive damages than the evidence in Garnett v. Transamerica, 118 Idaho 769, 800 P.2d 656 (1990), I question whether, in either case, the facts justify a conclusion that the conduct of either defendant was “an extreme deviation from reasonable *568standards of conduct, and ... the defendant acted with an extremely harmful state of mind, whether that state be termed ‘malice, oppression, fraud or gross negligence.’ ” Cheney v. Palos Verdes Investment Corp., 104 Idaho 897, 905, 665 P.2d 661, 669 (1983).