Court Opinion

ID: 9620562
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:43:50.780935+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:28:38.298934
License: Public Domain

Fatzer, J.,
dissenting: The use by plaintiff’s counsel of the “formula technique” was prejudicial error and allowed him to invade the province of the jury and get before it what did not appear in the evidence. An expert witness would not be permitted to testify as to the market value of pain and suffering or permanent disability, and certainly there is all the more reason for counsel not to do so. In Henne v. Balick, 51 Del. 369, 146 A. 2d 394, the supreme court of Delaware said:
“It has long been the rule in this State and elsewhere that the determination of the amount of plaintiff’s damage for pain and suffering shall be determined by the trier of facts based upon the evidence submitted. This is so because any specific yardstick based upon the evidence presented is entirely lacking and courts generally do not favor the determination of damages based upon speculation or fancy. It is only in comparatively recent years that the use of a mathematical formula has been permitted in any of our courts for consideration by the jury in ascertaining the amount of plaintiff’s damage. . . . There is no testimony in this case — and none would have been received if offered — in support of these figures.
*226“. . . As we view this evidence, plaintiff was permitted by means of a blackboard demonstration of plaintiff’s counsel to put in the record evidence which he would not otherwise have been permitted to introduce. It seems to us that if such evidence is to be permitted, it would be equally logical to permit expert witnesses to testify before the jury as to the reasonableness of the figures submitted for pain and suffering. No one would deny that to permit such a procedure would not only be fantastic but would be casting aside entirely the rules of procedure long followed in this country and England of permitting a jury to determine the amount to which a plaintiff would be entitled as damage for pain and suffering or other unliquidated damage based solely upon the evidence submitted.
“. . . We are also clearly of the opinion that in many cases at least the purpose of such use is solely to introduce and keep before the jury figures out of all proportion to those which the jury would otherwise have had in mind, with the view of securing from the jury a verdict much larger than that warranted by the evidence.” (1. c. 375, 376, 377.)
The point was considered by the supreme court of Missouri in Faught v. Washam (1959), 329 S. W. 2d 588, and in rejecting the “formula technique,” it said:
“. . . Only within the past few years have resourceful and ingenious counsel developed the ‘trial technique’ of appealing to the jury to follow a mathematical formula in admeasuring damages for pain and suffering. . . .
“To us, the considerations advanced by the authorities disapproving the mathematical formula argument are more persuasive. Whatever may be the cold logic or academic theory of the matter, the ungilded reality is that such argument is calculated and designed to implant in the jurors’ minds definite figures and amounts not theretofore in the record (and which otherwise could not get into the record) and to influence the jurors to adopt those figures and amounts in evaluating pain and suffering and in admeasuring damages therefor. If an argument of this character is permissible and proper, it would be just as logical, and equally as fair, to permit ‘expert witnesses’ to evaluate pain and suffering on a per diem or per hour basis — a revolutionary innovation which, so far as we are advised, not even the most ardent zealots of the mathematical formula technique have (as yet) proposed. . . . The contention of its advocates that the mathematical formula argument is nothing more than that and is not evidence and that the fancied danger of its being mistaken for or accepted as evidence is greatly magnified and exaggerated by the timorous is a contention sound and plausible without but hollow and specious within. . . .” (pp. 602, 603, 604.)
See, also, Domann v. Pence, 183 Kan. 135, 141, 325 P. 2d 321.
I would reverse the judgment.