Defense Digest

SUPERIOR COURT HOLDS THAT NEW TRIAL IS WARRANTED WHENEVER A JURY SEEKS ITS OWN EXPERT OPINION

By Christopher A. Reeser, Esq.*

At just about every civil trial, the jury is required to weigh conflicting expert testimony regarding an important issue in the case. The party who has an expert witness whose opinions are accepted as credible by the jury will often be the party that receives the favorable verdict.

What should the court do if it finds out that some of the jurors may have reconciled the conflicting expert testimony by seeking their own expert opinion from a friend or a family member that they believe to be knowledgeable on the topic at issue? That is the dilemma that was placed before the Pennsylvania Superior Court in Pratt v. St. Christopher's Hospital, 824 A.2d 299 (Pa. Super. 2003).

The plaintiffs in Pratt brought a medical malpractice action on behalf of their minor son, alleging that the defendant-physicians failed to diagnose the subdural empyema suffered by the minor, which ultimately led to brain damage. The parties in the case presented conflicting expert testimony about the central issue in the case: whether a CAT Scan that was performed on the child during his eighth day of hospitalization should have been performed sooner. At the conclusion of the case, the jury found for the defendants.

After the verdict was announced and recorded, a juror sent the court a letter stating her belief that some of the other jurors relied improperly on information they gathered from relatives and friends involved in the medical profession to determine whether the defendants breached the standard of care.

As a result of the juror's letter, the plaintiffs filed post-trial motions in which they requested a hearing to determine whether outside influences affected the jury's deliberation.

The trial court denied the plaintiffs' motion for a hearing, citing what has come to be known in Pennsylvania jurisprudence as the "no impeachment" rule concerning whether a valid appeal can be made on a verdict rendered by a jury.

Under the no impeachment rule, a juror is deemed to be incompetent to testify about what occurred during deliberations. The no impeachment rule is applied very strictly, because a less restrictive rule would mean that no jury verdict would ever be safe from attack, and there would be nothing to prevent a juror to change his or her mind and, after rendering judgment, return to the court claiming that some outside influence affected his or her decision. Under no circumstances may the parties in a case elicit testimony about the reasoning process that went into the deliberations of the jury.

However, there is a narrow exception to the no impeachment rule which permits post-trial inquiry concerning outside influences which may have prejudiced the jury during deliberations. The outside influence exception permits a juror to testify only about the existence of the outside influence, but not about the effect that the outside influence had on deliberations.

The trial court in Pratt concluded that the letter from the juror about outside influences that may have affected her fellow jurors did not form a sufficient basis to warrant a post-trial hearing. The trial court felt that any issue on which a jury received outside information was amply presented at trial by the experts for the respective parties as to what period of time during the child's treatment it was reasonable to order a CAT Scan. The trial court, therefore, felt that any information a juror might have acquired outside of the court room was irrelevant and moot.

The Superior Court did not agree with the trial court's opinion that a new trial may not be warranted as a result of the information in the juror's letter. While the Superior Court agreed that under the "no impeachment" rule, jurors could not testify whether the outside information they received influenced their decision, the Superior Court said that it is important to find out whether the jury actively sought information from outside sources.

Even though the Superior Court agreed with the trial court that any information that could have been sought by the jurors through friends or relatives had already been presented by the parties at trial, the court believed that the mere fact that outside information may have been sought was prejudicial.

The Superior Court discussed other Pennsylvania appellate opinions in which the trial court's decision not to grant a new trial, despite juror misconduct, was affirmed because the trial court did not find in those cases that there was any prejudice. The cases cited, however, involved situations where a juror performed an independent investigation of an accident scene or examined a vehicle similar to the type involved in a fatal collision.

The Superior Court distinguished those cases from the potential juror misconduct in Pratt, because the Pratt jurors sought an opinion from an outside source from a person whom they found to be personally credible on the core issue in the case. Unlike the other jury misconduct cases, in which jurors examined physical evidence that was already a part of the case, the members of the Pratt jury were accused of bringing evidence into the jury deliberations in the form of a trusted third party's opinion.

The Superior Court remanded the case for an evidentiary hearing on the juror misconduct claim to determine whether the jurors, in fact, received opinions from outside sources regarding the appropriate standard of care. The court directed the trial court to order a new trial if the jurors did, in fact, seek outside information. The court did not give the trial court the discretion to determine whether the jurors were successful in obtaining outside information, or whether the outside information could have been so unhelpful as to not have possibly affected the jury's deliberations. The court ruled that if there was evidence that the jurors sought out a third party's opinion on which side's testimony to accept, a new trial was warranted.

* Chris is a shareholder in our Williamsport, PA office. He can be reached at (570) 326-9091 or creeser@mdwcg.com.