The defendants aren’t in the health care business, but their April 1 victory in the Tenth Circuit has implications for defendants in all lines of business. That’s why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce weighed in with an amicus brief on their behalf.
Amber Lompe’s lawyers thought they’d died and gone to heaven at the end of the punitive damage phase of her suit against her apartment building’s owner and management company. The defendants’ negligence led to Amber’s carbon monoxide poisoning, for which the jury awarded her $$2,700,000 in compensatory damages. But that was dwarfed by the $25 million in punitive damages.
Too dwarfed, the Tenth Circuit ruled on April 1. Given the facts of the case, the punitive-to-compensatory damages ratio of 11.5 to 1 made it Constitutionally suspect as “excessive and arbitrary” in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. That required the court to give it a second look, and that second look caused the court to conclude that a one-to-one ratio was appropriate. So the court reduced the punitive damages to equal the compensatory damages. The one-to-one ratio limit is what the Chamber has long argued for.
The case is Lompe v. Sunridge Partners, No. 14-8082 (10th Cir. 2017).
