Court Opinion

ID: 9765475
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:03:40.026446+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:10.264184
License: Public Domain

NEBEKER, Associate Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the result that the majority reached. However, I am writing separately to clarify what the majority’s exhaustive *558analysis tends to obscure, namely that the statutory law in the District of Columbia easily resolves this case.
D.C. Code § 15-109 (1981) provides that in tort cases “the judgment for the plaintiff shall bear interest.” The intent of this statute is to provide interest for the successful plaintiff from the date of judgment. On January 27,1983, a jury awarded appellant Bell $65,000 in damages for her injuries resulting from appellee’s negligence. On that date the trial court ordered judgment on the verdict “with interest thereon from 1-27-83 at the rate ... provided by law_” Section 15-109 dictates that the plaintiffs judgment “shall bear interest”; subsequent procedural events in this case notwithstanding, appellant Bell won a judgment for damages against appellee and thus is entitled to interest from the date of that judgment, i.e., January 27, 1983.
The only other question that we might address concerns the accrual date for interest when a verdict is rendered and a judgment is not entered or is entered at a later date. In those cases, which are unlike the case before us, interest shall run from the date that judgment should have first been entered pursuant to Super.Ct.Civ.R. 58, which directs that “[u]pon a general verdict of a jury ... the Clerk, unless the Court otherwise orders, shall forthwith prepare, sign, and enter the judgment_” I believe that the District of Columbia statutory law and our rules of court furnish ample direction for the resolution of this case and others like it. Protracted forays into federal case law are more appropriate in those circumstances when such direction is truly needed.