The recent case of Peckham v. Singh, 2025 BCSC 263.
In this case, involving a 6-week jury trial and verdict regarding the extent of personal injuries and quantum of loss, Robert Brun, K.C. and Ryan Monty successfully represented the defendants in defeating an application by the plaintiff for a mistrial and preserved the jury’s verdict.
The plaintiff was injured in a motor vehicle accident and took issue with the jury awards claiming:
- There was a conflict in ordering $0 for past loss of income and awarding any damages for loss of future income earning capacity, cost of future care, and special damages.
- There was an inconsistency in awarding $0 for past loss income and the full amount of special damages.
- The jury verdicts on past loss of income and loss of future earning capacity were unsupported by any evidence and were inordinately low.
The case involved jury instruction and interpretation of conflicting testimony provided by the experts on earnings projections called by the parties. The jury was found to have been properly instructed on how to approach the expert testimony and the trial judge walked through how the jury findings were not in conflict. Moreover, the trial judge held that juries are not obliged to accept the arguments of counsel or numbers (quantum) proposed by counsel nor is it for a trial court to justify precisely how a jury arrives at an award.
In this case, the plaintiff argued there was no evidence to support the jury verdicts and that in the case of the award for future earning capacity, in particular, the award was also too low. The court reviewed a variety of scenarios that the jury could have followed to arrive at its verdict based on the evidence that was before them. The key takeaway is that trial courts have very limited jurisdiction to refuse to enter judgment in accordance with a jury’s verdict.
Further, the court underscored that it is not within the scope of a trial judge’s jurisdiction to order a mistrial on the basis of a party’s argument that a jury award is too high or inordinately too low. That is the role of the Court of Appeal.
The application was ultimately dismissed with costs to the defendants.