Collins v. County of San Diego (Feb. 17, 2021, D077063) __ Cal.App.5th __ [2021 WL 612570]
Plaintiff David Collins was arrested for public intoxication. He was jailed after a nurse screened him and determined that it was medically safe to do so. He fell twice while incarcerated and was transferred to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a low sodium condition and a brain hemorrhage. Doctors at the hospital increased Collins’ sodium level too quickly, resulting in serious and irreparable brain damage. He sued both the County and the hospital/physicians for his injuries. The hospital/physicians settled with Collins before trial for $2,750,000; the settlement did not apportion economic and noneconomic damages.
At trial, the jury returned a verdict awarding Collins $12,617,674 in total damages, including $8,000,000 in noneconomic damages. The jury allocated 30% fault to the deputies who arrested Collins (and interfered with the paramedics who were treating him), and 70% fault to the nurses who failed to identify his need for medical treatment. The trial court entered a judgment on the jury’s verdict.
In post-trial motions, the County sought to reduce the judgment by applying the MICRA cap to Collins’ noneconomic damages award against the nurses (which Collins did not oppose), and by offsetting the economic damage portion of the hospital/physicians’ settlement. The trial court agreed to an offset, but not to the degree argued by the County. The trial court accepted Collins’ argument that, under Espinoza v. Machonga (1992) 9 Cal.App.4th 268, the settlement should be allocated in proportion to the verdict—63.4% of the $2,750,000 settlement was allocated to offset noneconomic damages because 63.4% of the verdict (before any MICRA reduction) was for noneconomic damages. This allocation effectively attributed almost $2 million of the hospital/physician settlement to noneconomic damages; the trial court declined to take into account the fact that, under MICRA, the hospital/physicians could not be liable for more than $250,000 in noneconomic damages. The trial court therefore calculated a $1,006,500 economic damages offset and entered a revised judgment awarding Collins $6,261,174.
The County appealed, contending that the trial court misallocated the settlement offset. If the trial court had allocated $250,000 of the settlement to noneconomic damages (i.e., the full MICRA limit) instead of 63.4% of the verdict, the economic damages offset would have been much greater—$2,500,000—resulting in a $4,767,647 judgment, nearly $1.5 million less than the judgment entered by the trial court. But the Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that the trial court’s allocation was not an abuse of discretion. The Court of Appeal construed Rashidi v. Moser (2014) 60 Cal.4th 718 to indicate that the MICRA cap does not apply to formulas used to account for other tortfeasors’ settlement amounts.
