Blake v. Pellegrino

• Decision Date: 15 May 2003
• Docket Number: No. 02-1810.,02-1810.
• Citation: 329 F.3d 43
• Parties: William J. BLAKE, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. Michael PELLEGRINO, et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 43

329 F.3d 43

William J. BLAKE, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. Michael PELLEGRINO, et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 02-1810.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard April 9, 2003.

Decided May 15, 2003.

Philip N. Beauregard, with whom John A. Markey, Jr. and Beauregard, Burke & Franco were on brief, for appellants.

Curtis Diedrich, with whom Alan B. Rindler, Nadine Nasser Donovan, Rindler-Morgan, P.C., William J. Davenport, Richard M. Haley, Bloom & Buell, Stacey Morris, and Sloane & Walsh, LLP were on consolidated brief, for individual appellees.

J. Peter Kelley, with whom Martin C. Foster and Foster & Eldridge were on brief, for appellee Southcoast Health Systems, Inc., d/b/a Charlton Memorial Hospital.

Before SELYA, Circuit Judge, STAHL, Senior Circuit Judge, and LIPEZ, Circuit Judge.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This appeal requires us to explore the limits of a trial judge's authority to remove a significant piece of evidence from a jury's consideration based upon his belief that the evidence lacks persuasive force.¹ We conclude that, in the circumstances of this case, the judge's actions invaded the province of the jury. Because there is a reasonable likelihood that the error influenced the eventual verdict, we vacate the judgment as to the affected claims and remand the case for a new trial.

I. BACKGROUND

On October 30, 1998, Betty Ann Blake, a profoundly disabled woman in her mid-forties, was eating her mid-day meal at a daycare facility. A piece of meat lodged in her throat. She was taken to the emergency room at Charlton Memorial Hospital (the Hospital) in Fall River, Massachusetts. Although laypersons speculated that Betty Ann might be choking, she apparently refused to open her mouth and the doctors on duty did not conduct a full examination.

Betty Ann was admitted to the Hospital. The following day, she had a seizure and began to display labored breathing. The doctors performed an esophagoscopy. During the procedure, they discovered a bolus of meat in Betty Ann's esophagus and dislodged it. Shortly thereafter, Betty Ann suffered a heart attack. She died on November 1, 1998 (approximately twenty-four hours after physicians removed the piece of meat from her esophagus). The death certificate filed by the medical examiner listed "complications of asphyxia by choking" as the cause of death.

Betty Ann's parents, William and Theresa Blake, individually and as co-administrators of her estate, subsequently sued the Hospital and a trio of physicians (Drs. Michael Pellegrino, Miguel Brillantes, and Thomas Cahill). Their complaint, filed in the federal district court, charged that the defendants had negligently failed to diagnose Betty Ann's condition and had discriminated against her in violation of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 12181-12189, and the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. §§ 701-796l. In the course of pretrial proceedings, the district court dismissed the ADA claim and granted summary judgment for the physician-defendants on the Rehabilitation Act claim. The plaintiffs have not appealed from those orders.

The case went to trial on the remaining counts, which included the Rehabilitation Act claim against the Hospital, see 29 U.S.C. § 794, and state-law claims, grounded in malpractice, for wrongful death and negligent infliction of emotional distress against the physicians. At the start of the trial, the physician-defendants moved in limine to exclude the death certificate. The court ruled that the death certificate constituted admissible evidence and denied the motion. The plaintiffs promptly introduced it into evidence and published it to the jury. The court then allowed the jurors to inspect copies of the death certificate.

On the fifteenth day of trial, the plaintiffs rested. The physician-defendants moved, inter alia, to strike the listed cause of death from the death certificate. The plaintiffs objected. On the seventeenth day of trial — before the defendants had presented any evidence — the district judge excised the words "asphyxia by choking" from the death certificate, stating that he had come to believe that Betty Ann's death was "not caused by `complications of asphyxia by choking' as that phrase was understood either by a layperson or by physicians."²

The trial lasted another three days. After final arguments and the court's charge, the jury commenced its deliberations. On November 26, 2001, the jury returned a verdict for the Hospital on the Rehabilitation Act count but informed the court that it had reached an impasse on the remaining claims. The court gave the deadlocked jurors a modified Allen charge, see Allen v. United States, 164 U.S. 492, 501, 17 S.Ct. 154, 41 L.Ed. 528 (1896); United States v. Keene, 287 F.3d 229, 235 (1st Cir.2002), and directed them to resume deliberations. On November 27, the jury returned an across-the-board verdict for the defendants.

The plaintiffs filed a timely motion for a new trial. Fed.R.Civ.P. 59(a). As to the state-law claims, they argued that the district court had erred in redacting the death certificate, and, moreover, that the timing of the court's actions — allowing them to introduce the unredacted death certificate, publish it to the jury, and build their case around it, and then striking the pivotal language — had doomed their chances of prevailing. As to the Rehabilitation Act claim, the plaintiffs sought a new trial based on the district court's exclusion of medical records of non-disabled patients. The lower court took the matter under advisement. It eventually denied the motion in a written opinion. See Blake v. Southcoast Health Sys., Inc., 206 F.Supp.2d 174 (D.Mass.2002). The court insisted that none of its actions constituted error. Id. at 182. With admirable candor, however, the court conceded that if it had erred in the mid-trial redaction of the death certificate, its error was not harmless (and, thus, would require a new trial). Id. at 177. This appeal ensued.

II. THE STATE-LAW CLAIMS

The issue that lies at the heart of this appeal relates to the trial court's handling of an evidentiary matter. When an issue as to the admission or exclusion of evidence involves a question of law, such as the proper interpretation of a provision contained in the Federal Rules of Evidence, we afford de novo review. Crowley v. L.L. Bean, Inc., 303 F.3d 387, 394 (1st Cir.2002). When, however, the issue involves an application of a given rule of evidence to particular facts or a judgment call about, say, relevancy, we review solely for abuse of discretion. Id.

Identifying the precise question at issue in this appeal poses certain complications. These complications arise primarily from the parties' disagreement about whether federal or state law governs the admissibility vel non of the death certificate. The plaintiffs argue that state law controls because, by statute in Massachusetts, a party is entitled not only to introduce an official death certificate but also to have it serve as prima facie evidence of the cause of death. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 46, § 19. In the plaintiffs' view, the Federal Rules of Evidence "are not intended to substitute for, or trump, a clear state substantive right to have certain evidence admitted in a state tort death claim." Br. of Appellants at 27. The defendants argue to the contrary, asserting the primacy of the Federal Rules of Evidence. See, e.g., Br. of Physician-Appellees at 25 ("The fact that a state statute also existed regarding the admissibility of the death certificate [does] not trump the force of the Federal Rules of Evidence."). Although this is an interesting pedagogical debate, we do not resolve it here. Assuming arguendo that the Federal Rules of Evidence govern — an assumption consistent with the district court's position and optimally favorable to the defendants — the district court's handling of the evidence, as we explain below, does not pass muster.

A. The Error.

The fundamental question posed in this case implicates the division of responsibility between judge and jury. It asks whether a judge, presiding over a jury trial, may rule on the admissibility of evidence based upon his view of the persuasiveness of that evidence. In other words, may a trial judge refuse to admit evidence simply because he does not believe the truth of the proposition that the evidence asserts? In the circumstances of this case, we answer that question in the negative.³

The disputed evidence in this case — the cause of death specified in the death certificate — was plainly relevant to the issues before the court. See Fed.R.Evid. 401. Even so, a district court has the authority to exclude relevant evidence for various reasons. See, e.g., Fed.R.Evid. 403 (allowing the exclusion of evidence if the court finds that its probative value is substantially outweighed by its unfairly prejudicial effect, or that the evidence would tend to confuse or mislead the jury). But none of these mechanisms allows a trial judge to remove relevant evidence from the jury's universe solely because he finds the evidence unpersuasive. Perhaps more importantly, the trial judge in this case did not invoke any of them. Indeed, the judge made it very clear that persuasiveness (or the lack of it) was the perceived problem. See Blake, 206 F.Supp.2d at 177 (attributing the decision to redact to the fact that "the Court was no longer persuaded by the fair preponderance of the evidence that `complications of asphyxia by choking' was the primary cause of Betty Ann Blake's death"); id. at 176-77 ("As the trial progressed... it became increasingly evident [to me] that, whatever had caused the death of Betty Ann Blake after twenty-seven hours of suffering, it was not `complications of asphyxia by choking.'").

The question reduces, therefore, to whether, in the absence of special circumstances, see supra note 3, a trial judge has the authority to exclude evidence on the basis of his own...