SAN DIEGO (Legal Newsline) - An aspiring actress who suffered a traumatic brain injury after the driver of the Kia Forte she was riding in made a sudden U-turn across a three-lane highway won’t get a second chance at winning money from the manufacturer after a California appeals court rejected her arguments Kia should have been penalized for withholding documents and the jury room was too small.
In an opinion laced with criticism of plaintiff lawyers MLG Attorneys at Law, California’s Fourth Appellate District Court ruled the attorneys effectively forfeited their case by misrepresenting the trial record and failing to object about the size of the jury room in time.
Kamiya Perry sued Kia for $83 million after she was injured in a 2019 accident stemming from the driver’s decision to make a U-turn from the center lane of the highway. Unfortunately, there was a car in the left lane and the Kia was T-boned at 50 m.ph., rolling over and landing on its roof. Perry argued her injuries were caused by a malfunctioning air bag and seat belt tensioner, claims a jury unanimously rejected after a 2021 trial.
Perry appealed, arguing the trial judge should have instructed the jury that Kia’s seatbelt tensioner was defective as a penalty for failing to produce engineering documents in discovery. Kia initially said plaintiff lawyers sought the documents from its U.S. subsidiary, which didn’t have them, but eventually turned over more than 20,000 pages.
The judge rejected the plaintiff lawyers’ request, although he allowed a mention of documents withheld “for evil purpose” in closing arguments.
In an opinion published May 24, the appeals court criticized Perry’s lawyers for submitting an incomplete record including a trial transcript that skipped from page 258 to page 2,259. More objectionable, the court said, was the lawyers’ claim the trial judge should have sanctioned Kia for withholding evidence.
“The trial court cannot give an instruction that Kia concealed evidence without a finding that Kia concealed evidence,” the appeals court ruled. “Perry’s counsel not only misrepresented the record, but, ironically, concealed the comments that would have shown their claims to be false.”
Perry’s lawyers also claimed jurors were pressured into returning a quick verdict because they were confined to a small room during the Covid pandemic. They said they asked the judge to allow jurors to deliberate in the courtroom instead.
“However, that request does not appear anywhere in the reporter’s transcript,” the court said. “To the extent it was made off the record, it is well established that an off-record objection is inadequate to preserve an issue for appeal.”