
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 14, 1995                   TAG: 9506160018
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NS APPEALS $2.6 MILLION AWARD

A Roanoke jury's $2.6 million award to a railroad worker who said loud noise on the job cost him some of his hearing and his mental health is "monstrously excessive," lawyers for Norfolk Southern Corp. maintain.

In a motion filed this week in Circuit Court, the railroad asks a judge to reduce or throw out the verdict awarded to Allan Couch in a personal injury trial last month.

"The jury verdict was so monstrously excessive that bias, prejudice and speculation must have been present," Roanoke lawyer Paul Kuhnel says in the 29-page brief.

The motion points out that Couch could buy 17 brand-new Rolls Royce Silver Dawns with his tax-free award "with change left over." Or he could more than double his money by purchasing a 30-year annuity with an annual payout of $193,000.

Couch, a former brakeman for the railroad, claimed during the trial that prolonged exposure to train whistles and the roar of locomotives left him with a roaring in his ears that eventually drove him to the brink of insanity.

Lawyers for Couch argued that the railroad was negligent because it did not require employees to wear ear protection until 1990, despite studies that showed the dangers of excessive noise.

The railroad, however, argued that Couch was mentally ill all along, and that he had failed to prove that he was unable to work because of his hearing loss.

Couch, of Russell County, did not have problems listening to testimony or answering questions during the trial, the motion states, and his hearing loss was not considered disabling by American Medical Association standards.

But Portsmouth lawyer Willard Moody presented evidence that Couch suffered from tinnitus, or a constant roaring in his ears caused by exposure to excessive noise, that drove him into depression and mental illness.

Moody said the verdict was "not excessive whatsoever," considering that Couch experienced projected lost earnings of nearly $1 million from his $56,000-a-year job.

"The worst damage to this man was not his economic loss, but the damage to his mind and health, which has been totally devastated," Moody said Tuesday.

In addition to the large verdict, railroad lawyers cite several other grounds on which they base their request to "correct what plainly appears to be an unfair verdict."

Among them: that Moody inflamed the jury in his closing arguments with an improper comment about other hearing-loss claims filed against the railroad; that Judge Clifford Weckstein allowed Couch to increase the amount he sought from $1 million to $3 million during the course of the trial; and that there was insufficient evidence of negligence.

by CNB