Judge: Ronald F. Frank, Case: BC683080, Date: 2022-08-10 Tentative Ruling
Case Number: BC683080 Hearing Date: August 10, 2022 Dept: 008
Renteria vs Acuna, BC683080 Tentative Ruling on MNT
Deny plaintiff’s motion for new trial. The Court disagrees with Defendant’s timeliness arguments since, as the Reply brief points out, no judgment was ever entered on the jury verdict. Defendant never submitted a proposed judgment for the Court to enter. Addressing the MNT on the merits, the Court acknowledges that a MNT based on the ground of insufficiency of the evidence allows the Court to act as a “13th Juror” and weigh credibility and inferences. However, here the 13th juror is not convinced that the jury clearly should have reached a different result.
1. “The powers of a trial court in ruling on a motion for new trial are plenary. The California Supreme Court has held that the trial court, in ruling on a motion for new trial, has the power ‘to disbelieve witnesses, reweigh the evidence, and draw reasonable inferences therefrom contrary to those of the trier of fact’ [citation], that the court sits as ‘an independent trier of fact’ [citation], and that it must ‘independently assess[ ] the evidence supporting the verdict’ [citation]. The trial judge has ‘to be satisfied that the evidence, as a whole, was sufficient to sustain the verdict; if he was not, it was not only the proper exercise of a legal discretion, but his duty, to grant a new trial.’ [Citation.]” (Barrese v. Murray (2011) 198 Cal.App.4th 494, 503.) However, a trial “is not a practice run to be scrapped in favor of a more complete proceeding in the event of an adverse judgment.” (Garretson v. Harold I. Miller (2002) 99 Cal.App.4th 563, 575.)
2. Here, there was some evidence presented by Plaintiff that tended in reason to show that Mr. Renteria’s 2016 MVA injured his back or worsened a pre-existing and previously asymptomatic degenerative disc condition. But that evidence was contradicted by other evidence, including Dr. Kayvanfar’s expert opinion and by certain inferences the jury reasonably may have drawn. The jury could have dis-believed plaintiff’s wife and Dr. Kasimian in making their special verdict finding that Mr. Renteria failed to carry his burden of proving that the MVA was a substantial factor in causing his back injury. Dr. Kasimian did not see Mr. Renteria until several years after the subject MVA so he had no personal knowledge of how his patient was doing in the days, weeks, and months before or after the accident. The jury may well have drawn the inference that Mr. Renteria did not testify at trial, nor present any testimony from any health care provider whom he consulted in the first two years after the subject accident, because such testimony would be unfavorable to his burden of proof. The jury was instructed under CACI 203 that it may distrust weaker evidence if a party could have provided stronger evidence; the 11 of 12 jurors who found for the Defendant reasonably could have applied CACI 203 and distrusted the wife’s and Dr. Kasimian’s testimony. They could have drawn inferences as permitted by CACI 205 about Mr. Renteria’s failure to explain why he did not testify or why he did not seek compensation or present evidence of his past medical expenses. Leaving a jury to wonder about such basic
facts created a vacuum to be filled by inferences from other evidence that was presented at trial.
3. Typically, in a bodily injury case, the injured plaintiff testifies to the fact and nature of his or her injury. Typically, in a bodily injury case the doctors or other health care providers who rendered the initial treatment also testify to their observations, testing, and measurements that may tend to corroborate the injured party’s statements of injury and its connection to the defendant’s conduct. Typically, in a bodily injury case the injured party seeks compensation for his or her initial post-accident treatment and testing, and records of that medical care are presented to the jury as well. That missing evidence at this trial reasonably could have been inferred by the jury to have been available “stronger evidence” of a causal connection between Mr. Acuna’s negligent driving and Mr. Renteria’s manifestation of symptoms. Given the dearth of such stronger evidence presented at this trial, the jury reasonably could have distrusted the “weaker evidence” plaintiff presented instead. The jury could have adopted the opinions of both orthopedic surgeons that Mr. Renteria had a pre-existing, age-related disc protrusion at L5-S1 that was not caused by the MVA, and rejected the testimony from Mr. Renteria’s wife that his back only became symptomatic after the rear-end collision.
4. It is true that of the evidence presented at trial, the most recent medical record before this MVA contained no notation of low back pain. It is also true that Mr. Acuna testified that Mr. Renteria complained of pain at the scene of the accident. But the jury was not provided a comprehensive panoply of all Mr. Renteria’s pre-accident medical or employment records concerning a party who lifted and carried objects as a part of his daily pre-accident employment. While Mr. Acuna testified that he drove Mr. Renteria’s car from the scene of the accident to the gas station where the parties exchanged information, Mrs. Renteria was equivocal on whether her husband did or did not drive the car home after the accident. (When first asked she testified that he did drive the car, then she said she did not remember.) When asked if he had ever complained of back pain in the 1 or 5 years before the MVA, she testified “not that I recall” rather than “no” of “never.” In the absence of any testimony from Mr. Renteria himself, and in the absence of medical record exhibits containing comprehensive history and physical notes from the treating doctors’ interviews of the patient both before and after the MVA, a reasonable juror might well conclude that those absences of evidence warranted an inference to distrust the causation testimony of plaintiff’s wife of 35 years. Neither side performed an accident reconstruction and neither orthopedic surgeon expert was qualified to opine on accident reconstruction, so the jury and the 13th juror had no basis to conclude whether the rear-end collision would or would not correlate to having a sufficient change in velocity to injure the seat-belted plaintiff.
5. Plaintiff argues that the jury, or the Court acting as a 13th juror, should discount Dr. Kayvanfar’s testimony as having been impeached with his deposition testimony regarding the MRI bright signals / bright spots on the 2017 MRI and for giving
Defendant a very expensively purchased opinion. But the deposition testimony is not strictly impeaching since it only conceded that the 2017 MRI was “consistent with” a recent injury. Dr. Kayvanfar’s answer in the deposition at pp. 123-24 clarified that “consistent with” does not necessarily mean “related to” the accident. Arguably both the 2017 MRI and the 2nd MRI in late 2018 or early 2019 are “consistent” with recent injury because each, standing alone, could be read as showing a bright signal at L5/S1. To the Court, more important would be whether the spots at L5/S1 on the two MRIs were about the same brightness even though taken years apart. Dr. Kasimian at p. 116 of the trial testimony opined that that there was no significant change in the intervening time between the 1st MRI and the 2nd MRI, that they were “about the same.” Dr. Kayvanfar’s opinion was that both the 1st MRI and 2nd MRI years later showed the same level of “subtle” brightness of the spots or signals at L5/S1. The jury could thus have reasonably inferred that since the 1st MRI did not show a significantly brighter spot at L5/S1 than the 2nd one taken years later, the 2017 MRI did not provide objective evidence of an acute lumbar injury from the MVA just a month earlier. A juror asked a question of Dr. Kasimian as to a comparison of the two MRIs, showing that the trier of fact was focused on this objective evidence of a recent injury. That the jury was weighing the conflicting expert opinions can also be inferred from the jury’s requested read-back of Dr. Kasimian’s testimony.
6. Further, financial bias could be laid at the feet of plaintiff’s expert Dr. Kasimian, who arguably has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial. The jury could have inferred that he Dr. Kasimian hoped the jury would give him a funding source for his $275,000 recommended future surgery and payment for the first surgery which he characterized as successful but only for a finite period of time. With no evidence that he had been paid for the 1st surgery, the jury may well have inferred that he had not been.
7. In evaluating the competing experts’ testimony, the jury’s verdict makes it clear that they gave Dr. Kayvanfar’s testimony more weight. Dr. Kayvanfar opined that the MVA did not cause Mr. Renteria’s injury or symptoms; Dr. Kasimian opined that it did. Dr. Kayvanfar testified about facet hypertrophy and arthritic changes at L4/L5 and adjacent stenosis that could not have been caused by the accident; Dr. Kasimian did not rebut that opinion. Dr. Kayvanfar also presented unrebutted testimony that during his 2019 IME, plaintiff did not have radiating pain, tingling, or numbness down the length of the sciatic nerve such as into his calf, feet or toes. That testimony tended to show that there was no actual L5/S1 nerve root impingement or exacerbation of a pre-existing asymptomatic condition as Plaintiff claimed. Dr. Kasimian did not address or rebut that testimony either.
8. Trial judges are appropriately reluctant to overturn a jury verdict on grounds of insufficiency of the evidence where, as here, there are conflicting expert opinions and conflicting facts. This 13th juror acknowledges that there was evidence
supporting plaintiff’s theory of the case that would have been sufficient to uphold a verdict had the jury found for Plaintiff on the causation issue. But the jury went the other way. The Court declines to adopt the Reply brief’s speculation that the jury may have been confused about the burden of proof or misunderstood that there could be more than one cause of an injury. Taking a view of the record as a whole and considering reasonable inferences the jury may well have drawn, there was some evidence and some reasonable inferences from which the jury could have found that Mr. Renteria failed to prove that Mr. Acuna’s negligent driving was a substantial factor in causing an acute low back injury or a worsening of a pre-existing condition. Parties who request a jury to be the finder of fact must respect the jury’s weighing of the evidence and evaluation of witness credibility. The jury was attentive throughout and asked thoughtful and insightful questions. While the Court recognizes its duty to overturn a jury verdict if the evidence, taken as a whole, was insufficient to sustain the no-causation verdict, the Court here exercises its discretion to allow the jury’s decision to stand.