From Gregory v. Chohan, decided Friday by the Supreme Court of Texas, in an opinion by Justice Jimmy Blacklock, joined by Chief Justice Nathan Hecht and Justice Brett Busby, and mostly joined by Justice Jane Bland (three Justices didn't participate in the decision, so these four were a majority of the remaining six):
This case arises from a fatal accident on an icy, unlit stretch of highway near Amarillo. An eighteen-wheeler driven by Sarah Gregory jackknifed across lanes of traffic, and the resulting pileup caused four deaths. Among those killed was Bhupinder Deol, a truck driver, but more importantly a husband, son, and father of three.
Deol's wife and family brought a wrongful death action against Gregory and her employer, New Prime, Inc. The jury awarded approximately $16.8 million to Deol's family. Noneconomic damages—awarded to six family members for past and future mental anguish and loss of companionship—accounted for just over $15 million of the total. On appeal, the defendants challenged the size of the noneconomic damages award….
Assigning a dollar value to non-financial, emotional injuries such as mental anguish or loss of companionship will never be a matter of mathematical precision. But when properly called upon, appellate courts have a duty to ensure that the damages awarded for a noneconomic injury are the result of a rational effort, grounded in the evidence, to compensate the plaintiff for the injury…. "[T]here must be evidence that the amount found is fair and reasonable compensation, just as there must be evidence to support any other jury finding." Rather than limit review of noneconomic damages to elastic, impractical standards like the "shocks the conscience" test, our precedent instead requires evidence of both the "existence of compensable mental anguish" and "evidence to justify the amount awarded." …
"While the impossibility of any exact evaluation of mental anguish requires that juries be given a measure of discretion in finding damages, that discretion is limited." No matter the cause of action, the results of litigation should always be justifiable based on evidence and reason. "Juries cannot simply pick a number and put it in the blank." To guard against arbitrary outcomes and to ensure that damages awards are genuinely compensatory, the plaintiff in a wrongful death case should be required to demonstrate a rational connection, grounded in the evidence, between the injuries suffered and the dollar amount awarded.
Mental anguish and loss of companionship damages are neither punitive nor exemplary. They are compensatory. That label is illusory if courts do not require a rational connection between the amount awarded and the evidence of injury. While precision is not required—and surely cannot be achieved when placing a dollar value on the emotional toll of losing a loved one—some rational basis for the size of the judgment is a minimal requirement on which the law must insist.
Here, the plaintiffs produced—and the court of appeals recounted—sufficient, even ample, evidence demonstrating the existence of compensable mental anguish and loss of companionship suffered by Deol's family. But nothing in the record or in the plaintiffs' arguments demonstrates a rational connection between the injuries suffered and the amount awarded. The arguments made to the jury regarding the proper amount included references to the price of fighter jets, the value of artwork, and the number of miles driven by New Prime's trucks. Rather than rationally connect the evidence to an amount of damages, these arguments did just the opposite by encouraging the jury to base an ostensibly compensatory award on improper considerations that have no connection to the rational compensation of Deol's family….
