The Admiral is clearly pissed at USAA and isn’t letting up. I don’t see Judge Bridges changing his mind again. Karen Nelson has the breaking story at the Sun Herald:
Attorneys for the Lisanbys in their Katrina case against insurer USAA have filed a motion Monday asking Circuit Court Judge Billy Bridges to reconsider and let a jury decide punitive damages.
The Lisanbys, Admiral James Lisanby and his wife Gladys, won a verdict Friday in their case against USAA in Circuit Court. The jury awarded $910,000, saying wind had a hand in destroying their home and that the elderly couple suffered because of their insurer’s decision to deny all but $46,000 of their claim.
But Bridges decided over the weekend that there would be no punitive damages in the case. He ordered the jurors, who spent two weeks hearing the case, released.
Here is today’s print edition story:
Adm. James Lisanby and his wife, Gladys, haven’t given up on punitive damages in their Katrina case against insurer USAA.
Attorneys for the Lisanbys filed a motion Monday asking Circuit Judge Billy Bridges to reconsider and let a jury decide punitive damages.
“The issue is very important to the Lisanbys and the people on the Coast,” said Don Barrett, their attorney. “Punitive damages act as a deterrent. The whole point is to keep insurance companies from doing the same thing again.”
The Lisanbys won a verdict Friday in their case against USAA in circuit court. The jury awarded $910,000, saying wind had a hand in destroying their home and the elderly couple suffered because of their insurer’s decision to deny all but $46,000 of their claim.
How did Judge Bridges reach his decision? The story continues:
The 13-page motion to Judge Bridges gives reasons the court should reconsider punitive damages and points out similar cases in which punitive damages were allowed.
It states Bridges’ decision “flies in the face of the facts proven at trial, and ignores governing Mississippi law.”
In the meantime, Judge Bridges, who is from Rankin County, has put his reasons for denying punitive damages in a three-page opinion and mailed it to the circuit clerk’s office in Jackson County, where the trial was held.
“I came back home and spent hours and hours going through cases and then made my decision,” Bridges said Monday. He had no further comment until the written opinion reaches the clerk’s office and is filed.
Interviewed before the motion was filed, Bridges said he expected to be asked for reconsideration, but he said he could probably take care of any motions without having to return to Jackson County.
“There won’t be a way to hold the jury,” he said. “It’s over, the jury’s discharged.”
I would love to know the law on this. I looked it up on wikipedia but all I have found thus far is:
Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, “The law threatens certain pains if you do certain things, intending thereby to give you a new motive for not doing them. If you persist in doing them, it has to inflict the pains in order that its threats may continue to be believed.”