Gregory v. Chohan

670 S.W.3d 546

Sarah GREGORY and New Prime, Inc., Petitioners,

v.Jaswinder CHOHAN, et al., Respondents

No. 21-0017

Supreme Court of Texas.

Argued January 31, 2023

OPINION DELIVERED: June 16, 2023

Thomas C. Wright, Lisa M. Wright, Houston, Thomas R. Phillips, Austin, Fernando Pablo Arias, Dallas, Wanda McKee Fowler, Houston, Douglas Fletcher, Dallas, Brittany R. Greger, Houston, Steven A. Springer, Scott A. Brister, Austin, Evan A. Young, Austin, Travis County, Alex Bell, Cameron L. Davis, Austin, for Petitioners.

Micky N. Das, Jeffrey S. Levinger, Robert Timothy Tate, for Respondents Deol, Jagtar Kaur, Deol, Darshan Singh, Chohan, Jaswinder.

Michael H. Bassett, Sadie A. Horner, Dallas, for Respondents Perales, Alma J., Vasquez, William.

Kent G. Rutter, Houston, Brett David Kutnick, Nina Cortell, Dallas, Stuart Bradley Brown Jr., Mark R. Trachtenberg, Houston, Ryan Pitts, for Amicus Curiae Allied Aviation Feuling Company of Houston, Inc.

Charles R. ‘Skip’ Watson Jr., Austin, for Amicus Curiae National Liability and Fire Insurance Company.

Anna M. Baker, Houston, Paul Green, Dallas, for Amici Curiae Insurance Council of Texas, American Property Casualty Insurance Association, National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies.

Roger D. Townsend, Houston, Dana Livingston, Austin, for Amicus Curiae Canal Insurance Company.

Randall Sorrels, for Amicus Curiae Cruz, Cecilia.

George Scott Christian, for Amicus Curiae Texas Civil Justice League.

David Hyman, David F. Engstrom, Nora F. Engstrom, Charles M. Silver, Austin, for Amicus Curiae Law Professors.

John Bash III, Austin, Alexander Zendeh, for Amicus Curiae Sage Settlement Consulting LLC.

Allyson Ho, Dallas, Brian Sanders, Elizabeth Kiernan, Dallas, for Amicus Curiae The Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America.

John Blaise Gsanger, Houston, Quentin Brogdon, Dallas, for Amicus Curiae Texas Trial Lawyers Association.

Justice Blacklock announced the Court's judgment and delivered an opinion, in which Chief Justice Hecht and Justice Busby joined in full, and in which Justice Bland joined except as to Parts II.C.2 and II.D.

This case arises from a fatal accident on an icy, unlit stretch of highway near Amarillo. An eighteen-wheeler driven by Sarah Gregory jackknifed across lanes of traffic, and the resulting pileup caused four deaths. Among those killed was Bhupinder Deol, a truck driver, but more importantly a husband, son, and father of three.

Deol's wife and family brought a wrongful death action against Gregory and her employer, New Prime, Inc. The jury awarded approximately $16.8 million to Deol's family. Noneconomic damages—awarded to six family members for past and future mental anguish and loss of companionship—accounted for just over $15 million of the total. On appeal, the defendants challenged the size of the noneconomic damages award. The en banc court of appeals affirmed, concluding that the award was not "flagrantly outrageous, extravagant, and so excessive that it shocks the judicial conscience." 615 S.W.3d 277, 314 (Tex. App.—Dallas 2020). The chief issue before this Court is the size of the noneconomic damages award.

Assigning a dollar value to non-financial, emotional injuries such as mental anguish or loss of companionship will never be a matter of mathematical precision. But when properly called upon, appellate courts have a duty to ensure that the damages awarded for a noneconomic injury are the result of a rational effort, grounded in the evidence, to compensate the plaintiff for the injury. As we held over twenty years ago in Bentley v. Bunton , courts do not fully discharge that duty merely by concluding that a verdict is not so "excessive or unreasonable" as to shock the judicial conscience. 94 S.W.3d 561, 606 (Tex. 2002). We said almost 140 years ago that "[w]hat shocks the conscience or manifests passion or prejudice in the jury are tests too elastic for practical use in the great majority of cases." Gulf, C. & S. F. Ry. Co. v. Dorsey , 66 Tex. 148, 18 S.W. 444, 445 (1886). Our precedent requires courts reviewing the size of noneconomic damages awards to do more than consult their consciences.

As we have said before when reviewing mental anguish damages, "[t]here must be evidence that the amount found is fair and reasonable compensation , just as there must be evidence to support any other jury finding." Saenz v. Fidelity & Guar. Ins. Underwriters , 925 S.W.2d 607, 614 (Tex. 1996) (emphasis added). Rather than limit review of noneconomic damages to elastic, impractical standards like the "shocks the conscience" test, our precedent instead requires evidence of both the "existence of compensable mental anguish" and "evidence to justify the amount awarded." Id.

Today's case requires us to apply these principles from our prior holdings regarding mental anguish damages for the first time to a wrongful death claim. "While the impossibility of any exact evaluation of mental anguish requires that juries be given a measure of discretion in finding damages, that discretion is limited." Bentley , 94 S.W.3d at 606 (quoting Saenz , 925 S.W.2d at 614 ). No matter the cause of action, the results of litigation should always be justifiable based on evidence and reason. "Juries cannot simply pick a number and put it in the blank." Id. To guard against arbitrary outcomes and to ensure that damages awards are genuinely compensatory, the plaintiff in a wrongful death case should be required to demonstrate a rational connection, grounded in the evidence, between the injuries suffered and the dollar amount awarded.

Mental anguish and loss of companionship damages are neither punitive nor exemplary. They are compensatory. That label is illusory if courts do not require a rational connection between the amount awarded and the evidence of injury. While precision is not required—and surely cannot be achieved when placing a dollar value on the emotional toll of losing a loved one—some rational basis for the size of the judgment is a minimal requirement on which the law must insist.

Here, the plaintiffs produced—and the court of appeals recounted—sufficient, even ample, evidence demonstrating the existence of compensable mental anguish and loss of companionship suffered by Deol's family. But nothing in the record or in the plaintiffs’ arguments demonstrates a rational connection between the injuries suffered and the amount awarded. The arguments made to the jury regarding the proper amount included references to the price of fighter jets, the value of artwork, and the number of miles driven by New Prime's trucks. Rather than rationally connect the evidence to an amount of damages, these arguments did just the opposite by encouraging the jury to base an ostensibly compensatory award on improper considerations that have no connection to the rational compensation of Deol's family.

We also agree with Gregory and New Prime that the trial court incorrectly excluded a responsible third party from the jury charge. Because a reasonable jury could have determined that another company's truck was at least partly responsible for Deol's death, the trial court should not have denied the defendants’ request to designate that company as a responsible third party.

The judgment of the court of appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for a new trial.

I.

Around midnight on November 23, 2013, Sarah Gregory was driving a New Prime eighteen-wheeler eastbound on Interstate 40 toward Amarillo. The road was icy, traffic was light, and Gregory was traveling at 58 miles per hour. The highway had two lanes in each direction, divided by a median. In response to brake lights indicating a traffic jam a half a mile or so ahead, Gregory applied the brakes. The truck began to slide on the ice, and she lost control of it. The truck "jackknifed," which means that its trailer began to skid, pushed the cab out of alignment with the trailer, and eventually folded the cab back toward the trailer, rendering the truck immovable. When the truck came to rest, it was blocking the entire left lane and some of the right lane. Gregory did nothing to warn the drivers behind her of the obstruction. The highway was unlit, so approaching drivers had little notice of the hazard shrouded in the darkness ahead.

A tragic multi-vehicle pileup ensued. In addition to the New Prime truck, the accident involved two passenger vehicles and six other eighteen-wheelers. The first two vehicles to arrive on the scene were both trucks—a Maryland Trucking Company truck driven by Bhupinder Deol and a Danfreight Systems truck. Deol came first. Both trucks managed to steer around the New Prime truck on the right, but the Danfreight truck clipped Deol's truck after both had passed by. Deol's truck eventually stopped on the right shoulder of the road not too far past the disabled New Prime truck, and the Danfreight truck stopped on the grass between the highway and the feeder road.

Next came a truck owned by ATG Transportation. Unlike the two trucks before it, the ATG truck did not make it around the New Prime truck. Instead, its driver veered right and lost control. The ATG truck turned onto its side on the right shoulder, blocking most of the remaining space between the New Prime truck and the right edge of the highway. Only a few feet of space separated Gregory's truck, jackknifed on the left, from the ATG truck, overturned on the right.

Following behind the ATG truck was a van driven by Guillermo Vasquez.¹ Vasquez saw the ATG truck fall over on the right side of the road and steered left in response, but he could not avoid the wall of trucks almost entirely blocking the road. The Vasquez van hit the New Prime truck at less than ten miles per hour. A Prius followed the Vasquez van, crashing at high speed into the ATG truck on the right.² At this point, neither Deol nor the Vasquez van's passengers had been seriously injured. The next truck, however, struck the back of the Vasquez van at 56 miles per hour. This truck belonged to P&O Transport....