Court Opinion

ID: 9570837
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:26:50.025233+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:18:36.853268
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINION OF
LEVINSON, J., WITH WHOM KOBAYASHI, J., JOINS
I concur with the majority’s disposition of the negligence and attorney’s fee issues; but I dissent from its decision with regard to damages, which is, in my opinion, erroneous.
The majority’s use of Low v. Honolulu Rapid Transit Co., 60 Haw. 582, 445 P.2d 392 (1968), to delineate the standard for appellate disturbance of a trial court’s findings of fact is correct. An application of this standard to the facts of the case before us, however, leads me to conclude that the trial court’s determination as to the amount of damages was so grossly inadequate as to require this court to increase the award by means of an additur.
The majority apparently regards superficial conflict between medical experts as a convenient excuse for giving short shrift to the appellant’s injuries and, as a result, the seriousness of those injuries is inaccurately minimized.
The appellant possessed 20/20, or perfect, vision in both eyes prior to the accident. As a consequence of the accident, her straight ahead, or central, vision in the left eye was adversely affected, so that she now has a blank spot in her left eye when she looks straight ahead because of a hole in the retina. There is substantial permanent damage. Her own doctor testified that her vision is now 20/200, and the State’s expert measured it as 20/400. Her left eyeball drifts, a condition which may worsen. Finally, the appellant has lost depth perception at close range.
Nothing can be done medically, by means of surgery *617or the use of eyeglasses, to correct the damage. Furthermore, she now carries a weighty risk factor in the sense that she no longer has a spare eye; if anything happens to her right eye, the appellant will be considered legally blind.
The effects of the injury are considerable, aside from the swelling, bleeding and pain which accompanied the injury itself. The appellant’s activities have been severely restricted. She is limited in physical activities because she is unable to catch objects. Nor can she watch movies and television, read, sew, or type for any length of time. She even finds it difficult to put on makeup. Not surprisingly, the appellant has been forced to abandon previous career plans as a stewardess and in business.
Since I suggest additur as the preferred solution to the inadequate damage award below, it is necessary to address the threshold question of whether appellate courts even possess such power. The answer is, of course, in the affirmative.
Because the Seventh Amendment of the United States Constitution1 prohibits re-examination of facts tried by a jury except as permitted at common law, a distinction must be drawn at the outset between additur practices in the federal courts and those of state courts. In Dimick v Schiedt, 293 U.S. 474 (1935), the Supreme Court condemned the use of additur by the trial judge in federal courts on the theory that, unlike remittitur, it was not an established common law practice. The dissent,2 however, seems to me to be the better reasoned opinion, stating that the Court’s source is the power to act upon a motion *618to set aside a jury verdict as inadequate or excessive and the discretionary grant or denial of a new trial.3
State courts, on the other hand, are not bound by the same constitutional constraints, since the Seventh Amendment is not binding upon them. Harada v. Burns, 50 Haw. 528, 445 P.2d 376 (1968). Nor does the Hawaii Constitution contain any similar provision. Article 1, sec. 104 merely preserves the right to jury trial in civil controversies exceeding one hundred dollars in value.
The additur problem most often arises in the context of a trial court decision regarding the propriety of a jury’s damage verdict. A leading case on point is O’Connor v. Papertsian, 309 N.Y. 465, 131 N.E.2d 883 (1956), wherein the New York Court of Appeals held that an intermediate appellate court had the power to modify by means of additur a trial court’s order of a new trial on the grounds of an inadequate verdict. The court simply reasoned that the trial court’s additur power is undisputed, and since the appellate courts are enabled *619to render the judgment which the trial court could or should have rendered, the intermediate appellate court acted properly. In Bodon v. Suhrmann, 8 Utah 2d 42, 327 P.2d 826 (1958), the Supreme Court of Utah increased the amount of a judgment five times, granting a new trial, explicitly stating:
We are not here concerned with any question as to whether the disparity in the verdict is so gross as to indicate that the whole verdict is so suffused with passion and prejudice that it should be entirely set aside. The contention here is that the verdict is outside the limits of what appears justifiable under the evidence to the extent that it should not be permitted to stand. In such instances the remedy is to order a modification of the verdict to bring it within the evidence; and the adverse party is given the choice of accepting it or taking a new trial. This alternative does not infringe upon the right of trial by jury, because the party favored by the order has had his trial by jury and is seeking relief from the inadequacy of the jury verdict, while the party adversely affected always can choose the new trial if he so desires, (footnotes omitted) [8 Utah 2d at 45, 327 P.2d at 828-29]
Accord, Bachmann v. Passalacqua, 46 N.J. Super. 471, 135 A.2d 18 (1957).
While this question has not heretofore arisen in Hawaii, this court held in Striker v. Nakamura, 50 Haw. 590, 446 P.2d 35 (1968), that a trial judge not only may grant a new trial following an inadequate jury verdict, but in some circumstances he must do so.
The present case lends itself especially well to additur because the complicating issue of the defendant’s right to a jury trial is absent. Under HRS § 662-5, tort actions brought against the State must be decided by judges rather than juries.
*620Professor Moore’s view, which I would adopt, is as follows:
If the issue of damages was determined by the court and its findings of fact are clearly erroneous, so that they may be set aside by the appellate court under Rule 52(a), we believe that it has the power, where the record is adequate, to order judgment for an increased amount, (footnotes omitted) [6A Moore’s Federal Practice (2d ed. 1972) § 59.05(4], p. 3755]
The damage award below bears appellate scrutiny because its amount is so grossly inadequate in these days of high prices and continuing inflation for something as precious as sight.
There is, of course, no fixed standard in these matters beyond the requirement that the appellant be compensated reasonably for her injuries.
In view of the seriousness of the appellant’s injuries, I would increase her award to a minimum of $75,000 with the agreement of the defendant or, in the alternative, remand to the circuit court for a new trial on the damage issue only. Additionally, I would require a new judge on remand since, if this had been a jury trial, the appellant would have the benefit of a new jury.

 The Seventh Amendment of the United States Constitution provides:
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

 It is noteworthy that the dissenters in Dimick were Chief Justice Hughes and Justices Stone, Brandéis, and Cardozo, while the majority was composed of Justices Sutherland, McReynolds, Van Devanter, Butler, and Roberts.

 Said Mr. Justice Stone at 495-96:
If our only guide is to be this scant record of the practice of controlling the jury’s verdict, however fragmentary the state of its development at this period, and if we must deny any possibility of change, development or improvement, then it must be admitted that search of the legal scrap heap of a century and a half ago may commit us to the incongruous position in which we are left by the present decision: a federal trial court may deny a motion for a new trial where the plaintiff consents to decrease the judgment to a proper amount, but it is powerless to deny the motion if its judgment is influenced by the defendant’s consent to a comparable increase in the recovery.
But I cannot agree that we are circumscribed by so narrow and rigid a conception of the common law. . . . When the Constitution was adopted, the common law was something more than a miscellaneous collection of precedents. It was a system, then a growth of some five centuries, to guide judicial decision. One of its principles, certainly as important as any other, and that which assured the possibility of the continuing vitality and usefulness of the system, was its capacity for growth and development, and its adaptability to every new situation to which it might be needful to apply it.

 Article I, sec. 10 of the Hawaii Constitution provides:
In suits at common law where the value in controversy shall exceed one hundred dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. The legislature may provide for a verdict by not less than three-fourths of the members of the jury.