Leagle.com publicly distributes a wide range of court opinions, precedential and nonprecedential, from all over the country. Unlike Westlaw, Lexis, and Google Scholar, it is Google-searchable, so when a party's name is Googled, any opinion mentioning the party is likely to come up.
[1.] John D. Thomas had been involved in Modarres v. Thomas, which went up to the California Court of Appeal and came out badly for him. From the Introduction to the opinion (which also appears on Leagle):
John David Thomas and 184 Diamond, LLC (defendants), appeal from a default judgment entered after the trial court imposed terminating sanctions against Thomas for misuse of the discovery process. Following a default prove-up hearing, the court awarded plaintiff Farah Modarres a total of $217,000 in compensatory damages against defendants and $1 million in punitive damages against Thomas only. Defendants argue the trial court abused its discretion by imposing terminating sanctions against Thomas because a lesser sanction would have been sufficient. They also challenge the punitive damages award against Thomas on the grounds Modarres presented insufficient evidence of Thomas's net worth at trial, the punitive damages award was unconstitutionally excessive in amount, and the award erroneously excluded 184 Diamond, LLC, which was otherwise jointly and severally liable with Thomas for compensatory damages.
We conclude the trial court did not abuse its discretion by imposing terminating sanctions against Thomas for his misuse of the discovery process. We also conclude Modarres failed to present admissible evidence of Thomas's then current financial condition sufficient for us to make a well-informed decision whether the amount of punitive damages awarded was unconstitutionally excessive. We therefore modify the judgment to strike the award of punitive damages and remand for a new default prove-up hearing only on the issue of the amount of punitive damages. As modified, the judgment is affirmed.
