The Court of Appeal has concluded that the fact that a defendant in a wrongful death case is already being punished criminally by imprisonment is no bar to that defendant also sustaining civil penalties through imposition of punitive damages.
With her driving ability significantly impaired by the influence of alcohol, defendant Deborah Gurnett swerved off the highway and struck and killed a cyclist. She later entered a "no contest" plea to charges of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and received the maximum sentence of ten years' imprisonment. The heirs of the deceased cyclist brought a civil action against Gurnett to recover damages for wrongful death. At trial, the jury awarded compensatory damages of $7.5 million and punitive damages of $35,000.
On appeal, Gurnett argued that the punitive damage award violated her constitutional rights, because she is already being punished through her criminal sentence. She urged that punitive damages violated the Fifth Amendment's prohibition of "double jeopardy," the prohibition on double punishment under the "excessive fines" clause of the Eighth Amendment, and the requirements of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The appellate court rejects all of these arguments: the Fifth and Eighth amendment prohibitions only control multiple punishments inflicted by the government in a criminal context and have no bearing on the rights of civil litigants to recover damages for behavior that is also a crime. The court further declined to adopt a "single suit" rule that would effectively limit the pursuit of a wrongdoer to whichever case, criminal or civil, first came to trial:
The mere absence of case authority supporting Gurnett’s substantive due process argument would be a minor impediment if we thought the argument tenable, but we do not. Sound policy dictates rejection of a constitutional rule barring the filing of both a criminal complaint and a civil complaint for punitive damages for a single course of conduct that injures an individual and violates the criminal law. There is no doubt that the goal in each of these cases would be to impose a penalty on the wrongdoer. But, a constitutional prohibition against imposing both penalties would apply regardless of the order in which the cases occurred. Here, the criminal case was filed first and resolved first. There is nothing that mandates this primacy, however. To accept appellant’s argument would lead ineluctably to the conclusion that a defendant who had been subjected to civil punitive damages would be immune from a subsequent criminal prosecution. [Citation.] We decline Gurnett’s invitation to create such a rule.
The decision in Shore v. Gurnett (Sept. 10, 2004), Case No. A101916 can be accessed at these links in PDF and Word formats. [Note: The links will expire in approximately 120 days; the opinion should still be accessible thereafter by substituting "archive" for "documents" in the URL.]
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