Patrick v. State of Oregon

• Decision Date: 14 November 2001
• Parties: Vineta L. PATRICK, as personal representative of the ESTATE OF Ralph E. PATRICK, deceased, Appellant, v. STATE of Oregon, and Klamath County, Respondents.
• Court: Oregon Court of Appeals

36 P.3d 976

178 Or. App. 97

Vineta L. PATRICK, as personal representative of the ESTATE OF Ralph E. PATRICK, deceased, Appellant, v. STATE of Oregon, and Klamath County, Respondents.

98C-11291; A102733

Court of Appeals of Oregon.

Argued and Submitted February 7, 2000.

Decided November 14, 2001.

Meagan A. Flynn, Portland, argued the cause for appellant. With her on the briefs was Pozzi Wilson Atchison, LLP.

Jas Jeffrey Adams, Assistant Attorney General, argued the cause for respondents. With him on the brief were Hardy Myers, Attorney General, and Michael D. Reynolds, Solicitor General.

Before LANDAU, Presiding Judge, and LINDER and BREWER, Judges.

LINDER, J.

Plaintiff Vineta Patrick brought this action against defendants, the State of Oregon and Klamath County, seeking to recover damages based on the alleged negligence of the Klamath County court clerk. The trial court granted defendants' motion for summary judgment on the ground that, as a matter of law, the clerk's conduct was not the cause of plaintiff's damages. Plaintiff appeals, and we affirm.

This negligence action arises out of an earlier wrongful death action, which resulted in an appeal to this court. See Patrick v. Otteman, 158 Or.App. 175, 974 P.2d 217,

rev. den. 328 Or. 594, 987 P.2d 514 (1999). Plaintiff brought that earlier action as personal representative of her husband's estate, alleging medical malpractice against Otteman, a physician, and Merle West Medical Center (medical center). Before trial, pursuant to the parties' stipulation, the medical center was dismissed from the action with prejudice. The trial court signed a dismissal order denominated a "judgment." In entering the dismissal in the court register, however, the court clerk entered it as an "order," not as a "judgment." Several months later, the wrongful death action went to trial on the allegations against Otteman. The jury found Otteman liable and awarded plaintiff $98,694.10 in economic damages and $1,150,000 in noneconomic damages. After the jury's verdict, Otteman moved to reduce the award of noneconomic damages to $500,000, pursuant to the cap on such damages imposed by ORS 18.560(1).¹ Relying on decisions of this court declaring the statutory cap to be unconstitutional,² the trial court declined to reduce the award and, instead, entered a judgment against Otteman for the jury's full award. That judgment was entered on November 14, 1995.

Ten days later, the Oregon Supreme Court decided Greist v. Phillips, 322 Or. 281, 906 P.2d 789 (1995), which upheld the noneconomic damages cap imposed by ORS 18.560(1) as to wrongful death claims and overruled the contrary decisions of this court. Six days after the Greist decision, and in reliance on it, Otteman filed a motion in the trial court to modify and to reconsider the judgment and to reduce the noneconomic damages in conformance with ORS 18.560(1). The trial court granted Otteman's motions, vacated the earlier judgment, and entered an amended monetary judgment that reduced the amount of noneconomic damages to conform to the statutory cap. Significantly, the trial court did so on December 13, 1995. As earlier noted, the original judgment had been entered on November 14, 1995. Thus, the trial court modified its judgment before the 30-day period for an appeal had expired, and at a time when no appeal in fact had been filed. See ORS 19.255 (specifying time for appeal).

Both parties appealed the modified judgment. In the ensuing appeal, plaintiff argued that the trial court lacked authority to modify the judgment and to reduce the award of noneconomic damages because, when the trial court made the modification, the original judgment was final and appealable. Otteman protectively cross-appealed, arguing that the trial court erred in denying his original motion for entry of a judgment conforming to ORS 18.560.

That appeal was under advisement in this court when plaintiff brought this separate negligence action against the State of Oregon and Klamath County. Plaintiff alleged that, as a result of the court clerk's failure to enter the dismissal of the medical center in the register as a judgment, a delay "may have" occurred in entry of a legally enforceable judgment during which the law governing the amount of damages available to the estate "changed." According to plaintiff's allegations, the clerk's action compromised plaintiff's ability to collect the full value of her judgment against Otteman. Plaintiff sought damages in an amount that represented the difference between the noneconomic damages that the jury actually awarded against Otteman in the wrongful death action and the amount that the trial court imposed pursuant to the statutory cap.

In effect, then, plaintiff brought this negligence action protectively. As just described, in the then-pending appeal of the wrongful death action, plaintiff's position was that the original judgment was final and that, because it was, the court had no authority to modify it. If plaintiff were correct in that regard, then the original judgment would be reinstated. This negligence action was brought in the event that plaintiff was wrong. That is, if we were to conclude in the appeal of the wrongful death action that the court had the authority to modify the judgment, plaintiff expected our theory to be that the court had such authority because the original judgment was not "final" due to the court clerk's failure to enter the dismissal of the medical center as a judgment. Plaintiff therefore pursued this negligence action against the county and the state on the theory that the clerk's conduct damaged plaintiff by causing her to lose the benefit of the original judgment.

The appeal of the wrongful death action was still pending before this court when defendants moved for summary judgment in this action. In support of their motion, defendants argued that the clerk did not breach any duty by entering the dismissal in the register as an "order" rather than as a "judgment" because the dismissal, however it was denominated, did not legally qualify as a "judgment." See ORCP 67 A (defining "judgment" as a final determination of the rights of the parties to an action). The trial court agreed. The trial court also concluded that, when the court in the wrongful death action modified the original judgment, the original judgment was final and appealable notwithstanding the clerk's failure to enter the earlier dismissal as a judgment rather than an order. Thus, in the trial court's view, the issue of the legality of the later modification would turn on whether and under what circumstances a court may modify its own final and appealable judgment. Under that reasoning, the clerk's failure to enter the dismissal of the medical center as a judgment had no bearing on the legality of the modified judgment and, as a matter of law, the clerk's conduct could not have caused plaintiff's damages.

After the trial court granted defendants' motion for summary judgment in this negligence action, we decided the appeal and issued our opinion in the wrongful death action. Contrary to the trial court's reasoning in granting summary judgment in this case, we concluded that the clerk's failure to enter the dismissal of the medical center as a judgment did, in fact, prevent the original judgment against Otteman from qualifying as final and appealable. Patrick, 158 Or.App. at 187, 974 P.2d 217. We further concluded that, because the original judgment was not final, the trial court had authority to modify it and to reduce the award of economic damages consistently with Greist. Id. Given our resolution, we did not need to decide what authority, if any, the trial court would have had to modify the original judgment had that judgment been final, and we therefore did not reach that question. Id.³

This negligence action requires us now to decide that unresolved question. On appeal, the parties agree that the trial court's reasoning proved wrong, given our resolution of the appeal in the wrongful death action. The parties therefore focus on whether the grant of summary judgment nevertheless should be affirmed because the trial court was "right for the wrong reason."⁴ The parties agree, at least tacitly, that the causal link between the clerk's conduct and plaintiff's damages depends on whether the trial court in the wrongful death case had authority to do what it thought—albeit incorrectly—that it was doing: viz., modify its judgment, even though the judgment was final and appealable, because an appellate court pronouncement revealed that the judgment was legally wrong. Relying on both procedural statutes and principles of inherent authority, the parties take opposite views of the answer to that issue, with plaintiff asserting that trial courts have no such authority, and defendants asserting that they do. Because there are no disputed issues of fact, the question before us is purely one of law. See ORCP 47; Jones v. General Motors Corp., 325 Or. 404, 420, 939 P.2d 608 (1997) (in reviewing grant of summary judgment, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party to determine whether there are genuine issues of material fact and whether the moving parties are entitled to judgment as a matter of law).

Although the parties debate the significance of several provisions of the Oregon Rules of Civil Procedure (ORCP), we discuss only ORCP 71 C, which we conclude is dispositive. The first two subsections of ORCP 71 describe specific circumstances in which a trial court is expressly granted authority to vacate or modify a final judgment. See ORCP 71 A and 71 B. Subsection C operates differently. It expressly reserves trial court authority by providing:

"This rule does not limit the inherent power of a court to modify a judgment within a reasonable time, or the power of a court to entertain an independent action to relieve a party from a judgment, or the power of a court to grant relief to a defendant un

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