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New Trial Denied After Jury Finds Against Both Accident Participants

November 21, 2005

Logical inconsistency is not legal inconsistency. Violently proving Newton's Third Law of Motion, Elaine Socha's car and Tommie Redmond's motorcycle both tried to occupy the same patch of road at Ogden and California avenues in Chicago.

It seemed obvious that Socha or Redmond- if not both- was negligent in causing the collision. With Redmond's claim for $ 25,000 in medical expenses, and Socha's counterclaim for $ 7,000 in damage to her vehicle, they did not blame anything or anybody else for the accident. Yet the jury returned verdicts against both Redmond and Socha in the case of Redmond v. Socha (2005 WL 2457376).

Granting a motion for a new trial, a Cook County judge declared it was 'not logically possible to find that an accident occurred without its being anyone's fault.' Affirming, the Illinois Appellate Court concluded that the verdicts were 'irreconcilably inconsistent.'

Granting leave to appeal, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the intermediate court, and vacated the order for a new trial. Although the verdicts may have been 'logically inconsistent in the abstract,' they were 'not legally inconsistent,' because the jurors could have concluded that both Redmond and Socha failed to prove the other was negligent.

In discussing responsibility for the accident, the court said 'even though it is clear in the present case that 100 percent of the responsibility for the accident must rest, in some unknown proportion, upon either or both of the parties, it is still possible that the jury found the evidence so conflicting, inconclusive, and unsatisfactory that it simply could not determine from the evidence presented, whether Redmond was negligent and, if so, to what degree, and whether Socha was negligent and, if so, to what degree.

The court considered the jury's deliberations, saying 'it is also possible that the jury found the relative fault of the parties to be more or less equal to their proportion of damages and decided to do rough justice by just leaving each party where it stood. In effect, the jury could have found that Redmond caused his own injuries and Socha caused the damage to her car.' The court also said 'the jury could have found neither party credible and, thus, found the evidence so conflicting, inconclusive, and unsatisfactory that it could not find, by a preponderance of the evidence, that either party had made its case. The jury might have concluded that one of the parties was not negligent, but that he or she failed to meet the burden of proving that the other party was negligent.'

The court said 'because the law demands that a plaintiff meet the burden of proving every necessary element of his claim by a preponderance of the evidence, a jury may find against both the plaintiff and the counterplaintiff in a negligence action, even when the evidence suggests that the sole cause of the accident was the negligence of either or both parties.'

The court concluded that 'the jury's verdicts are not legally inconsistent,' going on to state that 'the verdicts in the present case may have been logically inconsistent in the abstract, that is, in the sense that when two parties are involved in an accident that occurs in the absence of any intervening cause, the accident must have been caused by the negligence of either or both. The verdicts are not, however, legally inconsistent because the jury did not find some essential matter proven in one claim but not proven in the other. Instead, the jury, dealing with the evidence presented rather than with abstract concepts, found neither claim proven.'