Mississippi Law Journal Article Examines Jury vs. Bench Trial Conflict in Multi-Party Litigation
How is a case decided when there is a Tort Claims Act defendant and a non-Tort Claims Act defendant? Jackson lawyer Madison Taylor of the Wilkins Tipton firm examines that question in a recent Mississippi Law Journal article titled: Resolving the conflict between the bench trial provision of the Mississippi Tort Claims Act and the right of trial by jury under the Mississippi Constitution.
Lawyers who have ever litigated these type of mixed-bag cases may feel like an equally appropriate title might be “looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.” Sadly, a generation of young lawyers has never seen the movie Airplane and completely misses this awesome joke.
The article starts with a dry summary of sovereign immunity and the Mississippi Tort Claims Act (MCTA). After noting that severance is probably not appropriate for the mixed-defendant case, the article discusses inconsistencies in allocation of fault that can happen when a judge is the fact finder of the claim against the governmental entity and a jury is the fact finder of the claims against the non-governmental entity defendant.
For instance, what happens if the judge apportions 0% of fault to the governmental entity and 100% to the private party and the jury does the opposite: 100% to the governmental entity? When that happens, the plaintiff and his lawyer win the prize for best “trial gone bad” story. Because the article concludes that the answer to what happens in that situation is: “too bad.”
The article concludes by asserting that the Mississippi Supreme Court should enact a rule to clarify the procedural conflict between the Mississippi Constitution's right to a jury trial and the MTCA's bench trial provision. Taylor asserts that the Court's rules should include the requirement that the the judge render a decision regarding the government entity before the jury verdict regarding the private defendant. That would be an interesting requirement that a lot of lawyers might support.
One of the favorite past-times of trial lawyers is to trade war stories of how long it took judges to rule in various bench trials. There can be a bit of urban legend feel to some of these stories. A lawyer once claimed that he had been waiting on a bench trial ruling for over 5 years—and counting. Needless to say, he did not wait at the courthouse like you would with a jury trial. I recently waited slightly more than 2 years for a bench trial ruling. By that point, I no longer remembered most of the witnesses' names and only had a broad recollection of the evidence at trial.
"When the conflicting provisions of the MTCA and the Mississippi Constitution clash, the only available solutions are to sever the actions or have them proceed in one bifurcated trial where the judge decides issues of fact related to the sovereign defendant and the jury decides those issues of fact related to the private defendant."
Why is that the only solution? What about challenging the constitutionality of this provision, or the MTCA as a whole? The MTCA is not an amendment to the Mississippi Constitution. Am I missing something?