Nashville, TN – In an opinion released today, the Tennessee Supreme Court remanded a civil case to the trial court to reconsider whether a juror’s independent research during jury deliberations required a new trial. In this case, a juror conducted research at home and shared that information during deliberations, violating the requirement that jurors base their verdict solely on evidence introduced at trial. However, the trial court declined to order a new trial.
This case involves a woman who had an allergic reaction to medicine administered to her during labor. Kendall Collier sued various medical providers after she gave birth, alleging that her baby suffered very serious injuries when her medical providers decided not to use epinephrine to treat her allergic reaction. The jury returned a verdict in favor of the medical providers. Ms. Collier later learned that a juror had examined the warning label on an EpiPen, an epinephrine auto-injector device, at home. The warning label listed risks of the medication, which the juror shared with the jury during deliberations. Ms. Collier sought a new trial based on the jury’s exposure to extraneous information. The trial court denied her request, finding that Ms. Collier had not established by clear and convincing evidence that exposure to the information affected the jury. The Court of Appeals later concluded that the trial court had applied an incorrect legal standard and reversed the trial court’s decision.
In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court clarified the appropriate legal framework for analyzing a challenge to a verdict in a civil case based on a jury’s alleged exposure to extraneous information. The Court held that, similar to criminal cases, the party asserting error bears the initial burden of proving, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the jury was exposed to material extraneous information. If successful, the burden then shifts to the party defending the verdict to show that the error was harmless by demonstrating that there is no possibility the information would have changed the verdict of a reasonable jury. Because the trial court did not use this legal framework when addressing Ms. Collier’s motion for a new trial, the Court remanded the case to the trial court for it to reconsider the request for a new trial under the appropriate framework.
To read the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Collier v. Roussis, authored by Chief Justice Jeff Bivins, visit the Supreme Court opinions section of TNCourts.gov.