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Horvitz & Levy persuaded the California Court of Appeal to affirm a defense verdict in an auto collision personal injury action and reject claims that defense counsel discriminated against Latinos in jury selection and that the judge made racially biased comments during trial.
Creonia Ward sued Taijuan Billingsley, claiming severe damages to her young son arising from a rear-end car collision. After the jury found for the defense, Ward appealed, claiming that Billingsley’s trial counsel discriminated against a Latino juror during jury selection and that the trial judge made comments that inappropriately disparaged some witnesses, sometimes with racially-tinged overtones, during their testimony.
In an opinion that largely adopted Horvitz & Levy’s briefing in full, the Court of Appeal rejected Ward’s arguments and affirmed the defense verdict. The court held that the trial court acted properly in crediting Billingsley’s trial counsel’s explanation that she tried to peremptorily strike the juror not due to his ethnicity but because he volunteered that he only understood about 40 percent of what was being said in English and therefore intended to go along with what everybody else on the jury decided. The court also agreed with Horvitz & Levy that plaintiff waived the judicial misconduct arguments on appeal by failing to object at trial.
