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Grandstaff v. Hawks5/31/2000
, the jury could not have found Ms. Grandstaff at fault for the collision. Second, State Farm, as Ms. Grandstaff's uninsured motorist carrier, is exposed to liability only to the extent that Mr. Forrest, the uninsured driver, is liable to Ms. Grandstaff. Third, State Farm never had and cannot now have any exposure regarding the claims between Messrs. Forrest and Hawks. Finally, the jury determined that Messrs. Hawks and Forrest were equally at fault (49% to 49%).
With these considerations in mind, we now turn to the record to determine what the jury would have done had the trial court instructed the jury to use the three-step approach we have approved in the preceding section of this opinion. We have determined that the jury's deliberations and decision would have been essentially the same.
The trial court's actual instructions regarding the calculation of the parties' damages do not differ from step one of our recommended procedure. In its instructions and verdict form, the trial court directed the jury to determine the amount of each party's damages without taking fault into consideration. Determining each party's damages was appropriate because each party was a claimant.
Had the trial court followed step two of our recommended procedure, it would next have instructed the jury to allocate all the fault (100% of the fault) that contributed to or caused the collision. Because the record contains no evidence that Ms. Grandstaff caused the collision, the jury would have been instructed to allocate 100% of the fault for the collision between Messrs. Hawks and Forrest. Rather than limiting the allocation of fault to Messrs. Hawks and Forrest, the trial court instructed the jury to include Ms. Grandstaff in its fault calculation. As a result, the jury allocated 2% of the fault to Ms. Grandstaff and then found Messrs. Hawks and Forrest equally at fault by allocating 49% of the fault to each of them. Thus, the trial court's instructions differed from step two of our recommended procedure because the trial court asked the jury to allocate fault to a party whose fault did not contribute to the collision.
Step three of our recommended procedure would have required the trial court to instruct the jury to determine the extent to which each claimant's fault contributed to his or her own injuries. The jury would have communicated its decision by calculating the percentage of each claimant's fault as well as the total percentage of fault collectively attributable to those whose fault caused the accident. For each claimant, these two percentages should have equaled 100%. In the actual trial, the jury determined that Ms. Grandstaff was 2% at fault for her own injuries. Therefore, the combined fault of Messrs. Hawks and Forrest must have been 98%. Thus, the jury's actual answers on the verdict form track what the jury would have done had it been given the instruction required by step three of our recommended procedure.
The problem with the instructions the trial court actually gave is that they did not require the jury to explain what it intended when it allocated 2% of the fault to Ms. Grandstaff. There are only two possibilities. First, it could signify that the jury found Ms. Grandstaff 2% at fault for the collision. Second, it could mean that the jury found Ms. Grandstaff 2% at fault for her own injuries. Because there is no evidence that Ms. Grandstaff was at fault for the collision, the only permissible interpretation of the jury's allocation of 2% of the fault to Ms. Grandstaff is that the jury determined that she was 2% at fault for her own injuries. If the fault allocated to Ms. Grandstaff did not relate to the collision, then it could be argued that 2% of the f
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