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Dangerfield v. City of Kansas City6/30/2003
ovember 29th order reducing the August 22nd judgment to $100,000 was not a new, amended judgment, then does the August 22nd judgment -- in particular, the uncapped damages -- stand, forcing the City to appeal from a judgment it thought it had amended? There is no Catch-22. The November 29th order changes the August 22nd judgment to comply with the statutory cap. The City could have sustained an appeal from the as-modified judgment of August 22nd. City of St. Louis v. Hughes requires that a trial court's final ruling be denominated a " judgment" for there to be an appealable judgment. 950 S.W.2d 850, 853 (Mo. banc 1997) . An appealable judgment must also dispose of all the issues and parties in the case, leaving nothing for further resolution. Id. at 852 . Both requirements were met. The November 29th order referred to the original judgment. It did not change the liability determination, did not add parties, did not do anything except change the amount of damages awarded to comply with the statutory cap, which was pleaded by the City. It is as if the court crossed out the original damage amount and merely re-issued the original judgment or stapled the November 29th order to the August 22nd judgment. (This is analogous to appeals from orders modifying alimony or child support. Section 452.110, RSMo. (2001), provides that "there may be a review of any order or judgment touching the alimony and maintenance of the spouse, and the care, custody and maintenance of the children, or any of them, as in other cases " (emphasis added). The statute anticipates that the court may modify by order. The statute does not exempt appeals of alimony and child-support modifications from Hughes' strictures, but rather provides that "there may be a review . . . as in other cases." This court has often reviewed trial court orders modifying child support awards where the remainder of the original decree was intact. See, e.g., Potter v. Potter , 90 S.W.3d 517, 519 (Mo. App. 2002) .) In fact, the City did appeal, though later voluntarily dismissing its appeal, in all likelihood because the trial court's granting of a new trial vacated the August 22nd judgment, thus depriving the City of standing to appeal, since it was no longer aggrieved. (Of course, as held infra , the trial court did not have the power to grant the City a new trial; the original judgment had not been validly vacated, so the City had standing to maintain its appeal.)
C. Did Rule 74.06 Authorize the Trial Court to Grant the City's Second Motion for New Trial?
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the trial court and the City intended the November 29th order (capping the damages) to be an amended judgment and that it could have been a judgment. Yet the trial court, through inadvertence, failed to designate it as such. Couldn't the court have sua sponte entered a nunc pro tunc order to re-denominate the order a "judgment"? If it could, then the December 10th so-called judgment was a valid nunc pro tunc , giving the trial court jurisdiction to entertain the City's December 20th motion for a new trial, because, according to this theory, a order nunc pro tunc is itself a judgment.
While a trial court may sua sponte correct a clerical mistake in a judgment (as the City has implied in its brief), there are, nevertheless, at least three major problems with this argument. First, the December 10th ruling was not intended to be a new judgment; it was a ruling on a post-trial motion regarding a judgment still in force. Second, " t is improper to use a nunc pro tunc order to correct judicial inadvertence, omission, oversight or error, or to show what the court might or should have done as distinguished from what it actually did, or to conform to what the cou
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