The Tennessee Court of Appeals has released its opinion in Davis v. 3M Co., No. M2018-02029-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. June 30, 2020). The syllabus from the slip opinion reads:
In this wrongful death action, the plaintiff, the decedent’s spouse, asserted claims against multiple defendants. The plaintiff settled with all but one of the defendants prior to trial, and the settling defendants were dismissed from the case. At trial, the sole remaining defendant asserted the comparative fault of the decedent and the settling defendants. The jury assigned percentages of fault to the decedent, the defendant, and the settling defendants but returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiff. The jury found noneconomic damages that, when reduced by the percentage of the decedent’s fault, exceeded the statutory cap. So the trial court entered a judgment against the defendant based on its percentage fault as applied to the statutory cap. On appeal, the plaintiff argues that the statutory cap was incorrectly applied. We affirm.
Here is a link to the opinion:
NOTE: Respectfully, I think this opinion is per incuriam for at least one very salient reason: the cap should have been 1.5 million and not $750,000.00 because there were two party-plaintiffs. See Yebuah v. Ctr. for Urological Treatment, PLC, No. 2018-M2018-01652-COA-R3-CV, 2020 Tenn. App. LEXIS 250, at *2–3 (Tenn. Ct. App. May 28, 2020)(no Tenn. R. App. P. 11 application filed as of July 1, 2020) (affirming trial court's application of the statutory cap on noneconomic damages to each plaintiff); OD'neal Baptist Mem'l Hosp.-Tipton, 556 S.W.3d 759, 761 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2018) (noting that a child's surviving parents were two party-plaintiffs in a wrongful death action filed for the wrongful death of the parents' child).
No comments:
Post a Comment