Scott A. Lawson v. Dale Trowbridge, Wendell Howland, and Lee Robarge

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding trial court should have permitted plaintiff to point out state's discretionary indemnification statute after state defendants \opened the door\ by testifying about their \financial weakness\
• observing that indemnification evidence is not typically permitted but holding that such evidence should have been permitted after the opposing party submitted evidence that the party could not afford to pay damages
• holding that a detainee’s failure to post bond to mitigate future damage while stuck in jail was reasonable as a matter of law, where the detainee would have had to divert funds from paying his rent to cover his bond; “Creating a bigger crisis (eviction
• recognizing “the general rule that evidence of payments received from collateral sources is inadmissible” but finding it inapplicable where “the defendants made their financial weakness the centerpiece of their testimony in the damages phase of the trial”
• “In this limited circumstance we will set aside the general rule against admitting [plaintiff’s] evidence (of a collateral source) because the defendants pleaded severe financial strain”
• “In the general case courts exclude evidence of indemnification out of a fear that it will encourage a jury to inflate its damages award because it knows the government—not the individual defendants—is footing the bill.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).