Court Opinion

ID: 9495816
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:10:56.84363+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:12.733457
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment. I write separately because I do not understand why my colleagues, after finding that VW did not preserve the issue of verdict inconsistency, have gone on to discuss that issue to the extent they do, even suggesting a likely consistency between the jury’s two verdicts. Whether or not the jury’s responses on defective design and negligence were inconsistent, VW’s failure to preserve the inconsistency issue, and the absence of *11plain error, makes the inconsistency issue irrelevant. New Hampshire law is so clouded as to make it undesirable for a federal appeals court to speculate unnecessarily in ways that might later be seen as pronouncements on one or another facet of the inconsistency issue.
I fully agree with my colleagues that by failing to object at the proper time to the court’s relevant instructions and jury forms, and by failing to object on inconsistency grounds after the verdict was read and before the jury was dismissed, VW waived any claim of verdict inconsistency. See, e.g., Howard v. Antilla, 294 F.3d 244, 251 (1st Cir.2002); Bonilla v. Yamaha Motors Corp., 955 F.2d 150, 155-56 (1st Cir.1992). And I further agree there was no plain error. The latter is not simply a question of whether the court acted correctly under New Hampshire law. Even a .clear and obvious error of state law would not, by itself, amount to plain error. The error would not be “plain”, so as to excuse VW’s failure to object, unless the error had also resulted in a miscarriage of justice. See, e.g., United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 733, 113 S.Ct. 1770, 123 L.Ed.2d 508 (1993); Chestnut v. Lowell, 305 F.3d 18, 20 (1st Cir.2002). Here I can see no miscarriage of justice regardless of whether or not the jury findings on defective design and negligence were inconsistent. It is therefore entirely unnecessary for this court to suggest there was in fact consistency, in particular because the negligence question submitted to the jury referenced negligent testing as well as negligent design. Reconciling the finding of no defective design with a finding of negligent testing, on this record, is not much easier than reconciling it with a finding of negligent design. To be sure, New Hampshire apparently permits cases to be submitted simultaneously on defective design and negligence theories, but this does not determine what should be done if the jury’s results seem contradictory in a particular case.
The overriding point here is simply that VW did not preserve the inconsistency issue. That should end the matter. While the jury’s logic with respect to its answers on the two counts is indeed debatable, there is no obvious injustice to entering judgment on the verdicts, as the court did. The jury’s intentions were entirely clear— it found liability predicated on negligence, and there was ample evidence to support such a finding. Whatever the inconsistency of its negative finding on defective design, that finding (if inconsistent) is most reasonably seen as the product of confusion as to the elements of the defective design count rather than as casting doubt on the validity of the jury’s resolution of the negligence count. There is nothing fundamentally unjust about entering judgment on both counts. If VW wanted to argue the inconsistency issue, it needed to preserve its rights.