 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
Eagle-Picher Industries Inc. v. Balbos8/29/1990
hasize the need to permit the exclusion sanction in order that the notice-of-alibi rule may have practical significance.
295 Md. at 395-97, 456 A.2d 29. The same is true for the enforcement of the pre-trial order rule. To give teeth to that rule and to effectuate its goal of efficient docket and trial management, the court must be allowed to employ meaningful or even drastic sanctions as the court has in the case at bar. Id. at 397, 456 A.2d 29. Permitting a continuance to prepare for Ayer would not have served as a sanction for violating the pre-trial order. As the Taliaferro court noted,
the threat of a continuance is not a sanction at all . . . . If all the defendant risks is a continuance, he will purposely not give notice [of a witness] because the witness is valuable to him . . . . The effect of using continuance as a "sanction" is also contra the deep concern of the bench and bar with trial delay.
Id. at 396, 456 A.2d 29(quoting Epstein, Advance Notice of Alibi, 55 J.Crim.L., Criminology & Police Sci. 29, 35-36 (1964)). Although the trial judge found that appellants did not purposely omit Ayer's name from the list of witnesses, but rather failed to proofread and correct the pre-trial order, that does not excuse appellants from the imposition of a sanction for not adhering to the requirement that the names of all witnesses appear in the pre-trial order.
Other factors considered by the court to determine abuse of discretion are found in McCloud v. State, 317 Md. 360, 564 A.2d 72(1989). There the Court stated that the defense's request to argue last required an exercise of the court's discretion, and that exercise of discretion involved a ruling based on all considerations and a balancing of alternative solutions.
When a court is required to exercise discretion, it must identify principles of law that govern the situation before it and then attempt to apply them in light of the factual and procedural posture of the case. This involves an exercise in balancing alternative solutions and deciding which one to apply, in order to advance the interests of justice . . . . Put otherwise, "discretion is properly exercised
if a trial judge makes his ruling based on ' all the considerations which properly enter into the problem.'"
Id. at 367, 564 A.2d 72(citations omitted).
The facts of the instant case indicate (1) that Ayer's proposed testimony was relevant, (2) that the transgression from the pre-trial order by the defendant was inadvertent, and (3) that the prejudicial effect of the transgression on the appellees may have been relatively minor and might have been remedied by other less harsh means. The importance of adhering to and being able to rely on the pre-trial order in this type of case, however, significantly outweighs the interest in having all relevant testimony. If this were an ordinary case, the factors to be considered in determining abuse of discretion as stated in Taliaferro and McCloud might warrant reversal. But this was not such a case and the collective interests of society in the disciplined management of these all-consuming asbestos cases must be weighed heavily against any prejudice suffered by a party. The parties have and in this case had an active role in creating the pre-trial order and it was their responsibility to ensure its quality. Therefore, the "manifest injustice" standard required by Rule 2-504(c) for a modification of a pre-trial order in this case and other (asbestos) mass tort cases is a difficult one to meet.
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Maryland Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|