Life — continued from Page 40
card, but it had expired and he did not have a current one in his possession at the time of his death. Defendants tried to claim that our decedent was an illegal alien. By eliminating economic damages and claims for loss of future earnings, the decedent’s resident status was rendered irrelevant and inadmissible. (See Hernandez v. Paicius (2003) 109 Cal.App.4th 452, 460.) In those cases in which there are no
such problematic issues, however, trial lawyers are more reluctant to waive eco- nomic damages. Although that is under- standable, such economic damages too often unfairly define and limit the value of the decedent’s life and loss. They also unintentionally place unnecessary bound- aries and limitations on the jury.
Michael Koskoff, the current presi-
dent of the Inner Circle of Advocates and the senior partner at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Connecticut, has considerable experience in trying wrong- ful-death cases. In one such case, the decedent was a 53-year-old truck driver with economic damages totaling approxi- mately $350,000. A decision was made to waive those damages and to proceed with only noneconomic damages. The jury awarded $11.5 million, and the defen- dants appealed. After the case was reversed and retried, the second jury awarded $22.5 million for noneconomic damages. As a result of that experience, Koskoff now believes that “concentration on relatively insignificant economic loss is a cheapening factor for a jury. Jurors
must be lifted above the mundane to achieve real justice.” Less than two weeks after the
Cuthbertson v. MTA verdict, a Los Angeles jury awarded $12.8 million in the wrongful-death case of Dylan Boeken v. Philip Morris, USA, Inc. In that case, Michael Piuze pursued only noneconom- ic damages at trial. That verdict was also recently upheld by the trial court.
Noneconomic damages in wrongful- death cases
When a loved one dies, it is the non-
economic damages that resonate with a jury. Jurors are asked to quantify the loss to the plaintiff of the decedent’s love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance,
See Life, Page 44
www.berbay.com mailto:
berman@berbay.com 42 — The Advocate Magazine JANUARY 2012
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