Court Opinion

ID: 9559686
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:33:47.918119+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:11:33.486429
License: Public Domain

BIVINS, Judge (concurring). I concur in both the discussion and the result of Judge Hartz’ opinion, and write separately only to briefly comment on Judge Pickard’s dissent. Prefatory to those comments, I think it useful to restate why Plaintiff’s tendered instruction on res ipsa loquitur is incorrect. A party is entitled to an instruction on his or her theory of the case if there is evidence to support that theory. State ex rel. State Highway Dep't v. Strosnider, 106 N.M. 608, 611-12, 747 P.2d 254, 257-58 (Ct.App.1987). The right to an instruction, however, is not absolute; the party must tender a correct instruction. Dessauer v. Memorial Gen. Hosp., 96 N.M. 92, 99, 628 P.2d 337, 344 (Ct.App.1981). In this case, the majority has assumed, without deciding, that the facts would support the giving of a proper res ipsa loquitur instruction; nevertheless, we have concluded that Plaintiff did not submit a proper instruction. The directions for use for SCRA 1986, 13-1623 (the res ipsa loquitur uniform jury instruction) state “[t]he names of the various individuals and the name or description of the instrumentality or occurrence should be inserted in the appropriate blanks.” (emphasis added). Instead of inserting in the blank a description of the occurrence, such as “operation for bilateral mastectomy” or similar wording, Plaintiff chose to describe her injury or damage as proximately caused by “inadequate protection of Plaintiff’s extremities.” Inadequate protection of her extremities was not the occurrence that would have justified giving a res ipsa loquitur instruction; rather, inadequate protection is a term that describes the specific acts of negligence Plaintiff relied on to prove Defendant negligent. This misdescription is made clear when one examines the issues instruction given to the jury. The district court instructed the jury that in order to establish medical malpractice on the part of Defendant, Plaintiff had the burden of proving that at least one of the following occurred during surgery: 1. The defendant failed to properly position plaintiff’s right arm; or 2. The defendant failed to properly pad plaintiff’s right arm, or 3. The defendant failed to properly observe that plaintiff’s right arm had become mispositioned on the arm board. The three specific acts of negligence can reasonably be interpreted as asserting that Defendant failed to adequately protect Plaintiff’s extremities. Had Plaintiff’s tendered instruction been given, the jury would have been told in the issues instruction that in order to find Defendant negligent, it must find one of the three specific claimed acts by Defendant, and then later told in the res ipsa loquitur instruction that it could infer Defendant was negligent if it found “inadequate protection of Plaintiff’s extremities.” When the issues instruction and the tendered res ipsa loquitur instruction are examined together, it is easy to see why the district court did not err in refusing to give Plaintiff's res ipsa loquitur instruction in the form tendered. The jury would have been instructed to infer negligence based on the very same acts which the court instructed Plaintiff must establish in order to prove negligence. This is not only confusing, but incorrect. The dissent suggests that the tendered instruction did nothing more than instruct the jury on Plaintiff’s theory of the case with reference to the specific negligence that Plaintiff attempted unsuccessfully to prove. I disagree. The tendered instruction did much more. It attempted to mix the two theories. This could only cause confusion since res ipsa loquitur is not premised on specific acts of negligence. Furthermore, I disagree with the dissent that the fault in the instruction is that it is too specific in its description of the occurrence causing the injury. The fault lies not in specificity, but rather in the failure to describe the occurrence at all. The defective language refers to the specific acts of negligence and thus negates the need for res ipsa loquitur which is based on an inference. Nor does the majority necessarily find fault with the res ipsa loquitur uniform jury instruction in the manner indicated by the dissent. Although the majority does comment that the language of the instruction may be misleading, the fault found with the tendered instruction is not with language found in the uniform jury instruction but with language added by Plaintiff. The dissent contends that it was appropriate for Plaintiff to have filled in the blank with the description of what her expert said caused her injury. This misses the point. Plaintiffs expert, Dr. Waring, referred to what we have called the “Waring protective procedures” which were and should have been incorporated in the issues instruction for proof of specific acts of negligence, not in the res ipsa loquitur instruction. Finally, the dissent argues that it is not possible to read the first element of Plaintiff’s requested res ipsa loquitur instruction as requiring the jury to find all the elements of a specific type of negligence. Perhaps not, if read in isolation; however, when read in conjunction with the issues instruction, that is the only reasonable interpretation. This interpretation is made clear when one considers the puxpose of res ipsa loquitur. Judge Hartz, writing for the majority, has adequately discussed the purpose; however, the examination of a typical res ipsa loquitur case demonstrates the point. In Pillars v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 117 Miss. 490, 78 So. 365, 366 (1918), the court applied the following logic when res ipsa loquitur was argued in the case involving contaminated chewing tobacco: “We can imagine no reason why, with ordinary care, human toes could not be left out of chewing tobacco, and if toes are found in chewing tobacco, it seems to us that somebody has been very careless.” In Pillars, a proper res ipsa loquitur instruction would likely have called for insertion of language such as “damage to plaintiff was proximately caused by the presence of foreign matter in chewing tobacco the packaging of which is under the exclusive control and management of defendant.” Had the plaintiff in that case inserted instead that the injury was proximately caused by “inadequate quality control” there would have been nothing for the jury to infer. In sum, res ipsa loquitur is appropriate when the injured party encounters difficulty in proving how the injury occurred. When the injury results from an occurrence that does not ordinarily happen in the absence of negligence on the part of the person in control, i.e., a toe in chewing tobacco or, perhaps, ulnar neuropathy following a surgical procedure, the jury may infer negligence. It does not, however, infer negligence from the proof of acts of negligence. Here, Plaintiff wanted the court to tell the jury that the act of negligence, “inadequate protection of Plaintiff’s extremities during anesthesia,” does not ordinarily occur in the absence of negligence. I agree the court properly refused to do so.