Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 3, 1993 TAG: 9311030018
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"It is a drastic measure indeed" for a judge to set aside a jury verdict, Roanoke Circuit Judge Clifford Weckstein said Tuesday. "I now do so."
Weckstein's ruling was based in large part on an expert witness's testimony, which the judge called "grounded in surmise and conjecture."
In May, a jury decided that Joseph Stover's injury was caused by the railroad's negligence and awarded him the latest in a string of verdicts that NS lawyers have called excessive.
Stover suffered a neck injury in 1990 while pulling a lever on a derail, a track device used to stop runaway boxcars, in Franklin County.
The former brakeman testified that he felt a "twinge" in his neck at the time, but did not seek emergency medical treatment.
A key witness in the four-day trial was a railroad consultant who testified for Stover that the derail had not been lubricated properly before the accident. The witness never examined the derail in question but based his testimony on photographs, railroad attorney Daniel Brown of Roanoke said.
Weckstein said the expert's testimony "fails to furnish a bedrock of fact upon which an opinion of negligence could have been predicated."
Other witnesses had testified that they had no problem working the derail. Four railroad supervisors went to the site the afternoon Stover was injured and pulled it 100 times without incident.
Brown called the jury's $500,000 verdict "shocking" and "totally out of line with the evidence."
But Stover's attorney, Kevin Bilms of Portsmouth, said he found nothing shocking with a verdict intended to compensate a 49-year-old man who suffered serious physical and psychological harm from the accident.
Although Weckstein based his ruling on the issue of liability, he also voiced concerns about how the jury decided damages in the case.
Railroad lawyers had argued that Stover, of Bedford County, was to blame - pointing to a long history of accidents and safety violations that ultimately led to his dismissal.
As a railroad town, Roanoke once was viewed as an unpopular venue by plaintiff's lawyers in NS accident cases. But NS officials have speculated that the company's cutbacks in the past 10 years - combined with demographic changes that have put more blue-collar workers on juries - have created a community bias against the railroad.
Since 1990, Roanoke juries have awarded more than $8 million to seven injured railroad workers. The verdicts ranged from $4.7 million for a signalman injured when a metal door slammed shut on him to $250,000 for a clerk who fell out of his chair.
by CNB