INDIANAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) - A man who claimed he was injured after a truck sideswiped his rental car lost his bid to overturn a jury verdict after the Indiana Supreme Court ruled the trial judge was correct in instructing jurors to consider his failure to follow doctor’s orders when calculating how much he should be paid.
Plaintiff Patrick Humphrey won $40,000 in his lawsuit against US Xpress but argued he was unfairly penalized by the jury because he failed to take recommended drugs, causing symptoms he attributed to the accident to worsen. Overturning an appeals court, the Indiana high court said the defendant trucking company need only present a “scintilla” of evidence to justify telling the jury they can consider the plaintiff’s failure to mitigate damages.
Humphrey sued US Xpress after one of the company’s trucks hit his vehicle on the highway in Indiana as he was driving from Georgia to Iowa. Humphrey said he hit his head on the car window but told police he wasn’t injured immediately after the accident. Once he arrived at his destination in Iowa, he said he felt eye irritation and pulled a sliver of glass from his eye.
Upon seeking further treatment for his eye injury, Humphrey got an MRI that uncovered a tumor on his pituitary gland. His ophthalmologist warned him he would go blind if he didn’t have the tumor taken care of, and Humphrey took a bus home to Georgia.
Back in Georgia, a neurosurgeon diagnosed a non-cancerous tumor of the pituitary gland as well as pituitary apoplexy, or the rapid expansion of an existing tumor that can be caused by a sudden event. Humphrey got the tumor removed and later suffered hormonal imbalance, for which his doctor recommended a drug to reduce his prolactin level. Humphrey said he couldn’t afford to pay for the drugs at first, then stopped taking them because of side effects.
His doctor recommended he make an appointment to find an alternative but Humphrey never followed through. More than a year later he began testosterone injections, which relieved his symptoms.
Explaining the law in Indiana, the high court said judges have broad discretion to instruct jurors on acceptable defenses and plaintiff theories. Tort defendants can ask the judge to instruct jurors to consider the effect the plaintiff’s own behavior had on his claimed damages, and reduce the award “by those damages which reasonable care would have prevented,” the court ruled.
The trucking company presented ample evidence Humphrey failed to take reasonable steps to mitigate some of the symptoms he was complaining about. He said his vision was impaired but failed to wear glasses or seek a new prescription from an optometrist after the accident, for example. And his symptoms largely went away after he began testosterone injections, months after they were recommended.
The defense in this case “pointed to evidence in the record that Humphrey’s own failings either aggravated his injuries or prolonged the,” the court wrote. “In other words, defendants say, Humphrey would have suffered less had he done more.”