The Texas Supreme Court has reversed a Dallas Court of Appeals decision affirming a multi-million-dollar judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in a fatality accident on IH 35. Among other things, the case raised troubling issues regarding the trial court’s ruling on the defendant’s Batson challenges to the use of the plaintiffs’ peremptory strikes. It also featured a substantial award of mental anguish damages based on scanty evidence.
United Rentals North America, Inc. v. Pamela Evans, Individually and as Administrator for the Estate of Clark Brandon Davis, and Dominic Jones (No. 20-0737; delivered May 12, 2023) arose from a horrific multi-car traffic accident that occurred when a flatbed truck hauling an oversized load crashed into bridge in a construction zone near Salado. The crash caused a bridge beam to collapse onto Clark Davis’s truck, resulting in his death. Davis’s mother and son filed a wrongful death and survival action against several defendants, including the owner and driver of the truck, construction contractors, and United Rentals, which owned the equipment that struck the bridge. Plaintiffs settled with all defendants except United Rentals. The case proceeded to trial. The jury found United Rentals negligent and assigned 30% of the total award of $9.3 million to United. The lion’s share of the damages, $5 million, went to Davis’s estate for his conscious pain and mental anguish prior to death. The trial court entered judgment on the verdict, and United Rentals appealed. The court of appeals affirmed.
In an opinion by Justice Blacklock, SCOTX reversed in part and remanded to the trial court for further proceedings. United Rentals raised three issues on appeal to SCOTX: (1) the trial court’s rulings on its Batson challenges; (2) whether it owed a legal duty plaintiff; and (3) the legal and factual sufficiency of the evidence supporting the jury’s findings on negligence and Davis’s mental anguish. Taking the Batson issue first, Justice Blacklock observed that “[m]ost Batson claims ask courts to engage in the speculative enterprise of inferring race-based motivations from a record that is facially race neutral. This is the rare case in which the record contains an admission of counsel’s preference for jurors of a certain race.” The facts thus resembled those in Powers v. Palacios, 813 S.W.2d 489 (Tex. 1991), in which “counsel admitted that a juror’s race ‘figured into’ the decision to strike her.”
Here plaintiffs’ counsel stated on the record that “[w]e know from our focus groups that the African-American female is the most favorable juror for this case for whatever reason.” Counsel made that statement as part of their own Batsonchallenge to defendants’ use of five strikes on African-American females. But at the same time, counsel used four strikes on white males and one strike on an Hispanic male. Based on this record, the Court dispensed with the usual three-part Batson analysis. Ordinarily, proving up a Batson challenge is not easy, requiring the challenger first to make a prima facie case of racial or gender discrimination in the exercise of peremptory strikes. The burden then shifts to the party exercising the strikes, who must have some race or gender-neutral reason for the strike (which doesn’t even need to be persuasive or plausible). If that party has such a reason, the trial court must figure out whether the party challenging the strike “has proved purposeful discrimination, and the trial court may believe or not believe the explanation offered by the party who exercised the peremptory challenge” (citations omitted). To show purposeful discrimination, the challenger must rebut what amounts to the credibility of the striking party. And credibility is “purely a question of fact for the trial court,” which will only be reversed for an abuse of discretion. In this case, however, no such analysis was necessary because the record clearly showed that racial preference determined how plaintiffs exercised their peremptory challenges. The only remedy for that is a new trial.
As to the question of whether United Rentals owed a legal duty to plaintiff, the Court concluded that it did. Quoting Torrington Co. v. Stutzman, 46 S.W.3d 829, 837 (Tex. 2000) and other authority, “[I]t may be said generally, on the one hand, that if a party negligently creates a dangerous situation it then becomes his duty to do something about it to prevent injury to others if it reasonably appears or should appear to him that others in the exercise of their lawful rights may be injured thereby. On the other hand, it may be said generally, as a matter of law, that a mere bystander who did not create the dangerous situation is not required to become the good Samaritan and prevent injury to others.” United Rentals argued that even though it mistakenly loaded a ten-foot boom lift on a flatbed trailer that could only safely haul an eight-foot forklift without a boom arm, the trucking company owed non-delegable statutory and administrative duties to comply with load-height requirements, which it did not do in this case. The Court rejected this argument, observing that United Rentals “cite[d] no authority indicating that the mere existence of a statutory duty enforceable against the trucking company automatically eviscerates all other parties’ common law duties that might have arisen depending on the facts… United Rentals does not escape its common law duty to avoid negligent actions that create hazardous road conditions merely because other sources of law impose similar duties on other parties.”
Finally, the Court found the evidence legally and factually insufficient to support the jury’s award of $5 million for Davis’s pre-death mental and physical pain and suffering. As troubling as the jury selection issue in this case was, the court of appeals’ approval of a substantial award of mental anguish damages seemed exceedingly problematic to us at the time and was the subject of a dissenting opinion by Justice Schenk. As Justice Blacklock observed, Texas courts have long held that when the evidence is equally consistent with alternative facts, the jury may not infer either one. But the court of appeals allowed such an inference in this case, based on nothing more than the inconclusive testimony of the medical examiner who performed the autopsy that “there’s no way to know” whether the deceased was conscious or unconscious in the seconds before he died. The court of appeals relied on the examiner’s testimony that the deceased might have had 10-15 seconds of oxygen left in his brain when the impact occurred, coupled with the accident reconstructionist’s opinion that the deceased might have had time to “have an ‘oh, my gosh,’ moment,” the court of appeals found that it was enough to support the jury award.
The Court, however, reversed, holding that “[a]ny portion of the mental anguish damages awarded by the jury based on Davis’s awareness of the impending injury was based solely on speculation and therefore cannot stand.” Reviewing the evidence, the Court concluded that it was purely speculative and could not support the judgment. The Court rendered judgment for United Rentals on the survival claim brought by Davis’s estate and remanded for new trial on the remaining claims.
