Jury questions sent to the judge during deliberations in the Tyler Skaggs wrongful death trial against the Los Angeles Angels suggest that financial penalties are on the minds of jurors, even as the first two days of jury discussions ended without a verdict.
The notes are no guarantee that the ball club will be found liable for the Skaggs’ shocking 2019 death, but taken together they appear to indicate that potentially hefty financial damages are under active consideration by jurors.
Early Wednesday, jurors sent the judge a note asking to review testimony from financial experts brought to the stand by both the Angels and the Skaggs family to discuss what Skaggs could have earned if not for his untimely death.
Then, shortly before deliberations ended for the day, the jury sent the judge another note asking, “Do we as the jury get to decide the punitive damage amount? There is no field (on the form) for it?”
The judge told lawyers she would instruct the jurors that should their verdict open the door to punitive damages, they would decide the exact amount later.
Skaggs, at the time a 27-year-old starting pitcher for the Angels, was found dead in a Texas hotel room at the start of a team road trip. He had crushed and snorted a counterfeit pill — which turned out to contain fentanyl — given to him by longtime team public relations director Eric Kay, which he apparently combined with oxycodone and alcohol.
Attorneys for the Skaggs family allege that the team turned a blind eye to Kay’s own drug use and his distribution of opioids to Skaggs and other players and say Kay failed to warn the players to the dangers posed by pills he was buying from dealers online.
Attorneys for the team counter that Skaggs kept his addiction a secret — not only from the team but from his own family and agent — and was responsible for his own death.
If the jury does decide the Angels have any responsibility for Skaggs death, they can consider multiple forms of monetary damages.
For economic damages, experts for the Skaggs family estimated that the pitcher could have earned more than $100 million during his career, while the experts for the team contended he would have earned $32 million at most.
Attorneys for the family didn’t put a dollar figure on their request for compensatory damages for love and companionship on behalf of Skaggs’ wife and family. But they suggested it should be more than his potential baseball earnings.
The jurors will also have to decide whether the Angels should be on the hook for punitive damages, which go beyond the plaintiff’s losses in order to punish a defendant that acted particularly maliciously or negligently in order to deter them from doing it again. If the initial verdict calls for it, the attorneys would argue over what punitive damages are appropriate and the jurors would deliberate again to decide an exact figure.
Jurors have plenty of evidence to sift through, with more than 40 witnesses having testified during a two-month-long trial. The jury took a break on Thursday, and is scheduled to return to Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana on Friday to continue deliberations.
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