Personal Injury Law

Making the Proper Objections if a Jury Returns an Inconsistent Verdict - Example from a St Louis Bike Accident Case

By Benjamin J. Sansone, Esq.

A few years back I took a St Louis bike accident claim through a jury trial in St Louis County. The case arose from a "right hook" by the driver of the car. See facts of the St Louis bike accident here.

The jury returned a verdict after a few hours of deliberation and found the driver 100% at fault, however, the jury awarded less than the total medical bills submitted, even more baffling was that the medical bills submitted were undisputed. Any skilled St Louis injury trial lawyer would immediately object that the bike injury verdict is inconsistent. How can you find the driver 100% at fault and yet award less then the undisputed damages?

In Douglass v. Safire, 712 S.W.2d 373 (Mo. banc 1986), which involved a Missouri motorcycle collision and injury, the Missouri Supreme Court explicitly held that an inconsistent verdict must be brought to the attention of the trial court before the jury is discharged or the claim of inconsistency is waived. Id. at 374.

We now hold that a claim that a verdict is inconsistent to the point of being self-destructive must be presented to the trial court before the jury is discharged. Otherwise the claim of inconsistency will be held to have been waived. The reason is that, if the point is raised as soon as the verdict is returned, any error is capable of correction by ordering the jury to return for further deliberation. Our holding is in accord with the usual rule that the trial court must be given the opportunity to correct error while correction is still possible.

Being a St Louis area personal injury attorney that has also gone through phases of being an avid cyclist, I have witnessed first hand the hostility towards cyclists on the roads as well as the dislike for cyclists by juries. After the bike accident trial above was over I questioned a few of the jurors and they said the reason they gave less than the undisputed damages was that they felt the cyclist should not have been on the road during that time of day (dawn) or that somehow it was her fault just because she was on the road as a cyclist; remember the jury did find the truck driver 100% at fault. So drivers' general dislike of cyclists did come through in this verdict, a fact a bicycle accident lawyer must be keenly aware of.

The bike accident verdict above was appealed on that ground as well as others, and the case settled during the appeal process.

Full post as published by Missouri Injury Law Blog on March 16, 2011 (boomark / email).