Jury Awards Study Article

NYTimes.com Article: A Study’s Verdict: Jury Awards Are Not Out of Control
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001
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A Study’s Verdict: Jury Awards Are Not Out of Control By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Critics of the civil justice system have argued for years that reform is needed because of runaway punitive damage verdicts by juries. But a comprehensive study of nearly 9,000 trials across the country has found that judges award punitive damages about as often as juries and generally in about the same proportions. The role of judges in awarding punitive damages was “surprisingly prominent,” the study found, adding that moves to limit punitive awards by juries “may be a solution in search of a problem.” The study, believed to be one of the largest of punitive damage awards, challenges widely held ideas about jurors’ decisions that have influenced state judges, legislators, Congress and even the United States Supreme Court. Jury punitive damage awards, which are intended as punishment, have been a focus of particular criticism because of occasional huge awards that critics say have no relation to compensatory damages, which are intended to pay injured people for their losses. A draft of the study, provided by the authors, said that judges and juries each awarded punitive damages in about 4 percent of the cases in which plaintiffs won. The study, to be published in March in the Cornell Law Review, analyzed court statistics on 8,724 trials in 45 large trial courts across the country. It was conducted by two Cornell professors, Theodore Eisenberg and Martin T. Wells, and three analysts from the National Center for State Courts, an independent research group in Williamsburg, Va. By showing that judges and juries generally have similar views of punitive damages, the study suggested that juries may be far less arbitrary than is widely believed, said Neil Vidmar, an authority on jury issues at Duke Law School who was not involved in the Cornell research but was familiar with it. “It is novel,” Professor Vidmar said, “because the conventional wisdom is juries are irresponsible, incompetent and don’t know how to make an assessment.” The study is expected to be controversial not only because it concludes that jurors may be more rational than they were believed to be, but also because it contradicts other research. “It would be contrary to the results I have found,” said W. Kip Viscusi, a law and economics professor at Harvard Law School, “and it seems inconsistent with the fact that in the real world you see judges reducing punitive awards by juries.” Professor Viscusi is among the researchers whose work has been used to make the case that jurors are often irrational in their punitive damage decisions. In one article published in 1999, Professor Viscusi reported results of interviews with 95 state judges and 277 people who were eligible for jury service. Responding to questions about a hypothetical railroad accident, 23 percent of the judges but 67 percent of the jurors said they would have awarded punitive damages. In an interview, Professor Eisenberg of Cornell Law School, an author of the new study, said its importance was that it was based on a broad sample of actual cases, not on hypothetical cases. He said policy makers around the country have been making decisions about restricting the powers of juries that were not based on fact. “We find no evidence of their punitive damage awards being different than what judges do,” he said. The data Professor Eisenberg and his colleagues studied concerned trials conducted in 1996 in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Of the 8,724 cases studied, juries decided 6,429, and judges decided 2,295. Punitive damages were awarded by the juries in 121 of those cases and by the judges in 55 of the cases. When judges and juries did award punitive damages, the study found, they generally did so in roughly the same proportion to compensatory damages. The study said the authors found “no judge-jury difference in the relation between punitive and compensatory awards.” But the study did acknowledge that there were rare extreme punitive damage awards from juries and judges. Professor Eisenberg said there were a handful of extreme verdicts, 7 of the 121 jury punitive damage verdicts, in which the punitive damages were many multiples of the compensatory awards. But he said the frequency was far less than critics of juries suggested. Appeals courts often overturn such verdicts, he noted. When extreme cases are discounted, he said, the study shows that, if anything, judges may grant larger punitive damage awards per dollar of compensatory award than juries in the cases that do not get attention as excessive. Victor E. Schwartz, general counsel of the American Tort Reform Association, a business group that lobbies for changes in the law, said it was such occasional extreme jury verdicts that proved the need for limits on punitive damages. “A jury that has been misled by incorrect, unfair rulings by judges who act as a cheering section for the trial lawyers is much more likely to render an outrageous verdict than a judge is,” Mr. Schwartz said. But Professor Eisenberg said the new study undermined such contentions. “Policy is being determined on the notion that there are these crazy jurors out there that need to be reined in by legislatures and courts,” he said. “The evidence is that juries are not out of control.”