The Texas Supreme Court has put a stop to a commercial trucking case in a Tarrant County trial court until it can sort out a defendant’s petition for writ of mandamus challenging the trial court’s death penalty sanctions against it.
The underlying litigation in In re Newkirk Logistics, Inc. (No. 24-0255) arose from a 2021 side-swipe accident between a truck driven by Newkirk’s employee and a passenger vehicle. Plaintiff sued the driver and Newkirk, alleging negligence and gross negligence, including a “cap-buster” punitive damages claim against Newkirk. Newkirk, a shipper that hauls cargo for companies such as DHL, stipulated that the driver was an employee and acting in the course and scope. Plaintiff served a discovery request for Newkirk’s contracts with DHL, but Newkirk responded that it couldn’t locate anything responsive to the request. Later in the case, DHL produced two documents purporting to show a contractual relationship between it and Newkirk. Plaintiff promptly sought sanctions, alleging that Newkirk intentionally concealed the agreements. At a Zoom hearing, the trial court abruptly cut off the defense’s arguments and orally struck Newkirk’s pleadings. When no written order followed, Newkirk sought mandamus relief from the Fort Worth Court of Appeals. That court abated the proceedings pending a written order fronm the trial court. Plaintiff’s counsel produced a draft of such an order, which the trial court signed. The court of appeals denied Newkirk’s petition without substantive explanation. This petition and motion for emergency stay followed.
In brief, Newkirk contends that the death penalty sanctions are excessive and unwarranted. The alleged discovery “infractions,” it argues, “did not significantly affect Plaintiff’s ability to develop or prove their case and were related to discovery on Newkirk’s relationship with a co-defendant rather than Plaintiff’s claims against Newkirk.” Further, the trial court made no effort to make the sanctions “fit the crime,” as SCOTX has cautioned courts must do. Instead, the trial court accepted wholesale Plaintiff’s allegations of “egregious” conduct without any evidence that Newkirk’s discovery responses were intentionally misleading or whether Newkirk had actual or constructive possession of documents electronically generated by DHL. Striking Newkirk’s pleadings thus completely deprived Newkirk of its due process rights to a defense and amounted to a default judgment on liability for actual and punitive damages.
We recently reported on another case in which the Houston [14th] Court of Appeals stepped in to order a trial court to vacate its death penalty sanctions in a case in which defense counsel allegedly misrepresented a Spanish-to-English translation of a contract. This case looks a lot like that one in terms of the relationship between the “crime” and the “punishment.” There is a distinction in that in this case, the defendant itself has been alleged to have committed the misconduct, not counsel, as occurred in the prior case. But here the corporate representatives who had testified that they did not know of a written contract (Newkirk’s contracts with DHL were online contracts) swore that the testimony was accurate when they gave it, though they corrected it after DHL produced the documents. Even if these actions did violate the trial court’s discovery orders, they don’t seem to rise to the level of executing the defendant on the spot, as the trial court apparently did here.
