CHEYENNE, Wyo. (Legal Newsline) - A father who sued his son after falling in the son’s back yard lost his bid to revive the case after the Wyoming Supreme Court refused to reverse a jury decision the father argued was tainted by testimony about how much beer he’d had to drink that night.
Robert M. “Mike” Roberts was visiting his son Benjamin’s house in 2019 to watch fireworks when he stepped or stumbled off the back deck, twisting his ankle and injuring his shoulder. He was transported to the hospital in an ambulance and later received foot surgery and a shoulder replacement.
Mike then sued his son for failing to fill in a hole in his yard, but a jury rejected his claim. Mike then appealed, arguing the jury should have heard testimony about what his son and daughter-in-law said about maintaining their yard and shouldn’t have heard about how much beer he drank.
The Wyoming Supreme Court rejected both arguments in a Jan. 26 decision.
On the question of yard maintenance, the trial judge barred the jury from hearing deposition testimony in which Benjamin and his wife were asked “if this hole were there before Mike fell, should you have discovered it and fixed it?” The couple answered yes, but the judge refused to let it into the record because it was a lay opinion about the standard of care for maintaining yards.
The Wyoming Supreme Court agreed. “Testimony to the standard of care is unnecessary and unhelpful when it involves matters an average juror can understand,” the court ruled.
Mike was equally unsuccessful convincing the high court the jury shouldn’t have heard about his beer consumption. He brought over a cooler with six to eight “tall boys” but there was conflicting testimony about how much he drank, with the son saying two beers and Mike maintaining he’d only had a sip. Either way, the plaintiff argued it was prejudicial for the jury to hear anything about beer.
Not so, the Supreme Court ruled.
“The jury was confronted with competing theories on causation; Mike stumbled off the deck due to his alcohol consumption and injured himself or Mike stepped off the deck into a hole that caused him to fall and injure himself,” the court concluded. “Testimony to his alcohol consumption would make one theory more or less likely to be true.”
Mike Roberts was represented by C. John Cotton of the Cotton Law Office, while Benjamin and his wife were represented by Curtis Buchhammer of Buchhammer & Ward.