Sleeth v. Louvar

• Court: Iowa Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: LARSON, Justice.
• Citation: Sleeth v. Louvar, 659 N.W.2d 210 (Iowa 2003)
• Decision Date: 02 April 2003
• Docket Number: No. 01-1315.,01-1315.
• Parties: Dena SLEETH, Appellant, v. Tony Eugene LOUVAR and Doug Louvar, Appellees.

659 N.W.2d 210

Dena SLEETH, Appellant, v. Tony Eugene LOUVAR and Doug Louvar, Appellees.

No. 01-1315.

Supreme Court of Iowa.

April 2, 2003.

Martin A. Diaz, Iowa City, for appellant.

Matthew J. Nagle and Amy L. Reasner of Lynch Dallas, P.C., Cedar Rapids, for appellees.

LARSON, Justice.

We granted plaintiff Dena Sleeth's application for further review of a court of appeals decision regarding submission of an "aggravation" instruction in her personal-injury action. The plaintiff claims the district court's decision to give an aggravation instruction due to her preexisting arthritis conflicts with our decision in Waits v. United Fire & Casualty Co., 572 N.W.2d 565 (Iowa 1997), and earlier cases. We vacate the decision of the court of appeals, reverse the judgment of the district court, and remand for a new trial.

I. Facts and Prior Proceedings.

Dena Sleeth was injured on April 1, 1998, when the defendant, Tony Louvar, ran a stop sign and hit her vehicle. Louvar admits his negligence. Sleeth had pain in her knees immediately after the accident and went to St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids for an examination. X-rays of her knees did not disclose any abnormalities.

Pain from her injury persisted, and on June 10, 1998, her physician referred her to an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. John Turner. Surgery on her left knee was performed on October 7, 1998. During surgery, the doctor found degenerative arthritis in Sleeth's left knee, and he believed this was present prior to the accident. At the time of the accident, Sleeth was thirty-one years old. She testified that she had no pain in her knees prior to the accident, but she does admit that her knees have "popped" since childhood.

II. The "Aggravation" and "Eggshell" Concepts.

In Waits, as in the present case, the court instructed the jury on preexisting conditions under both the "eggshell" and "aggravation" concepts. We said:

To clarify the scope of the instructions involved here, we start with the general rule that a defendant is liable only for injuries caused by the defendant's fault, and not for pain or disability resulting from other causes. Thus, if a plaintiff had a prior back injury that caused pain and a ten percent disability before the injury inflicted by the defendant occurred, the defendant would not be responsible for the disability and pain that predated the current injury, but only for any additional pain and disability caused by the current injury. Under these circumstances, an aggravation instruction is appropriately submitted to the jury.

The eggshell plaintiff rule is an exception to the general rule. This exception applies only when the pain or disability arguably caused by another condition arises after the injury caused by the defendant's fault has lighted up or exacerbated the prior condition. The law on this point was clearly stated in Becker [v. D & E Distributing Co., 247 N.W.2d 727 (Iowa 1976)]:

It is also apparent mere existence of a prior nondisabling, asymptomatic, latent condition is not a defense. A tort-feasor whose act, superimposed upon such condition, results in an injury may be liable in damages for the full disability. In these cases the injury, and not the dormant condition, is deemed to be the proximate cause of the pain and disability.

Waits, 572 N.W.2d at 577 (citations omitted) (quoting Becker, 247 N.W.2d at 731).

Sleeth's orthopedic doctor testified that the accident would have "aggravated her preexisting condition of osteoarthritis." The defendant has seized on this language as proof that the aggravation instruction was properly given. The plaintiff responds that "aggravation," as used by the doctor, was not used in its legal sense but in the sense it had lighted up a dormant arthritic condition.

III. The Issue.

The single issue is whether the district court properly instructed the jury on a theory of aggravation of the plaintiff's preexisting condition as well as the "eggshell plaintiff" theory. Jury instruction No. 14 stated:

Evidence was presented indicating that Dena Sleeth has arthritis in her knees.

If you find Dena Sleeth had arthritis which caused her pain or disability before this accident and this condition was aggravated by this accident causing further suffering, then she is entitled to recover damages caused by the aggravation. She is not entitled to recover for any physical pain or disability which existed before the incident or for any injuries or damages which she now has which were not caused by the Defendant's actions. [aggravation instruction]

If you find Dena Sleeth had arthritis but without pain or disability before this incident and this condition made her more susceptible to injury than a person in normal health, then Tony Louvar is responsible for those injuries and damages experienced by Dena Sleeth which were proximately caused by Mr. Louvar's actions, even though the injuries claimed produced a greater injury than those which might have been experienced by a normal person under the same circumstances. ["eggshell plaintiff" instruction]

The trial court based its instructions on Waits and Becker, explaining its decision to instruct on both the aggravation and eggshell-plaintiff theories in this way:

Waits deals primarily with both of the instructions [eggshell plaintiff and aggravation], but if you are going to give them both that you basically need to give some additional guidance to the jury, and I've attempted to do that by adding some language to the uniform instructions and have tried to make that as clear as I think that it is possible....

The jury awarded Sleeth $15,000. Past medical expenses were for $7499.95 of that amount, $1400 for past loss of full body; $600 for future loss of full body, and $5500.05 for past and future pain and suffering. It is impossible to tell whether the jury awarded compensation for one knee or both knees, and it cannot be known whether the jury applied aggravation or eggshell-plaintiff principles in determining the amount of damages.

IV. Disposition.

Alleged errors regarding jury instructions are reviewed for correction of errors at law. Herbst v. State, 616 N.W.2d 582, 585 (Iowa 2000). In Waits, as in the present case, the court instructed on both the aggravation and eggshell-plaintiff rules. In Waits the plaintiff had prior pain and disability because of an injury five years before the last injury. Her doctor testified the injury had healed, and "it was possible that Waits would be asymptomatic after her 1987 injury, but that her prior injury would make her more susceptible to a back injury in 1992." Waits, 572 N.W.2d at 576. The plaintiff testified she had no residual disability from her earlier injury as of the time of the collision in question. We said, based on the testimony of the plaintiff and her doctor,

the jury could conclude that Waits' back condition was a nondisabling, asymptomatic condition that made her more susceptible to injury than a normal person.

Id. An eggshell instruction was therefore appropriate. The trial court in Waits also instructed on aggravation because a jury could find that at least some of the plaintiff's disability from her accident five years earlier was present at the time of her last accident. Id. at 577.

The plaintiff's orthopedic surgeon, Dr. David Hart, testified that he observed arthritis in her left knee during surgery and that, in his opinion, the plaintiff had arthritis in both knees before the accident. However, he testified this was not necessarily disabling or painful as explained in this colloquy:

Q. Now, just because you have arthritis, does that mean you're going to have knee, and pain, and those types of things — knee problems, I mean. A. Well, not necessarily. It's possible that the ... accident kind of precipitated some of this.

Q. Okay. Did she give any history of any prior problems with her knees? A. I — I don't think I have any in my record that indicates that....

Q. So assuming she doesn't have — didn't have any problems with the knee beforehand, and had these arthritic changes in her knee — or at least some of those — what does the automobile accident actually do, if anything? A. Well, in my opinion, it would have ... aggravated her preexisting condition of osteoarthritis.

Q. Okay. And how does it aggravate it? A. Well, the ... direct blow ... it's already deteriorating a little bit, and you take a direct blow like a dashboard, a significant impact, it can cause some of that fragmentation to be worsened, loosen up some of that joint surface, spit some of those pieces of cartilage into the joint, cause inflammation.

The doctor was asked about apportioning Sleeth's disability between the preexisting arthritis and her disability following the recent accident:

I want to ask you about the impairment rating [in the doctor's report]. Do you feel as if any portion of the impairment rating ought to be attributable to her preexisting arthritic condition, and a portion of it to any aggravation that may have happened in this accident?

The doctor responded:

A. Well, I'll tell you, that's a very, very difficult thing and it's ... just pure speculation on my part to apportion, you know, that.

... A. I mean, ..., to ask me to kind of assign a certain percentage to the car accident, I ... think that would be impossible to do that.

The colloquy continued:

Q. [What] is your sense of what may have been caused and what may not have been caused by the collision? A. Well, a situation like this ... quite frankly, go[es] a lot on historical evidence. And [I have] got a patient telling me her knees didn't hurt beforehand, had a direct blow, and ... has a problem, so, I mean — I hate to put it in too much of simple terms but that's ... what I base a lot of [my diagnosis] on.

A friend of the plaintiff, who was living in the same home at the time of the accident, testified she had never heard the plaintiff complain about any knee problems, and she had noticed no problems in her mobility. The plaintiff was...