Santa Monica
Mizel v. City of Santa Monica (2001) 93 Cal.App.4th 1059, provides another good example of how prompt action by a plaintiff (or the judge acting sua sponte) may protect a judgment which would have been overturned on appeal had such action not been taken. There, defense counsel bitterly protested the fact that the judge explained to the jury what the judge perceived as an inconsistency in the jury’s verdict (the jury’s response to Question 5 negated any finding of liability, while its response to other questions expressly found liability) and then instructed the jury to return to the jury room to further discuss the matter. Hire riverside corporate lawyers for the corporation legal details.
When the jury retired, defense counsel objected to the court’s foregoing procedure and requested a mistrial, which was denied. The jury returned five minutes later, having changed the “no” response to a “yes” on Question 5 due to their corrected understanding of the question, and returned a verdict in plaintiff’s favor. On appeal, the court rebuffed defense counsel’s objection to the process and affirmed the verdict as it had been corrected by the jury. Had the judge not intervened, the appellate court would probably have had no choice but to reverse the judgment due to the inconsistency that the judge had spotted and forced the jury to clarify.
Where a jury verdict is fatally inconsistent, rather than “informal” or “insufficient” within the purview of Code of Civil Procedure section 619, the proper remedy is to seek a new trial.
As Professor Witkin discusses, this narrow exception to the waiver rule is well-illustrated by two cases. (7 Witkin, Cal. Proc. 5th (2008) Trial, § 376, p. 438.) The first is Morris v. McCauley’s Quality Transmission Serv. (1976) 60 Cal.App.3d 964. There, a minor sued an auto repair shop for the physical injuries Desiree suffered while she was in the car being test driven by an auto shop employee.
Additionally, Desiree’s mother sued the shop for the medical expenses Mrs. Morris had incurred on Desiree’s behalf. The jury returned an irreconcilably inconsistent verdict, ruling in favor of Mrs. Morris on her medical expenses claim, but against Desiree on her claim for personal injuries. As the court pointed out, the first finding necessarily implied the auto shop’s negligence and causation, whereas the second finding necessarily resolved one (or both) of those issues in favor of the auto shop. Accordingly, because the verdict was fatally inconsistent, the absence of an objection did not constitute any waiver.
The other case that illustrates this proposition is Lambert v. Gen. Motors (1998) 67 Cal.App.4th 1179. The Lambert court, itself, noted that the verdicts in question were not merely “inconsistent” but, indeed, “irreconcilable.” Witkin clearly explains why. Witkin, supra, § 376, p. 439 [noting that plaintiff’s negligence and strict liability claims were both based solely on a design defect theory; therefore it was impossible for the jury to find “inconsistently, that vehicle was negligently, but not defectively, designed”.
