Insurance and Trial
Posted By James Roane on May 12, 2010 12:57pm PDT
"Insurance" is not admissible in trials in North Carolina. No witness can mention insurance, coverage, claims or anything associated with insurance. The case will be you versus the defendant. So, the jury will never even be told that there is any insurance at all. Some jurors then are afraid to render a large verdict, because they don't want to cause the defendant to become bankrupt. In one such trial in Davidson County which involved the death of a mother of three kids killed by a truck driver, the jury came back with a $260,000 verdict. I talked to the jurors after the trial, and many told me that they would have came back over $1 million but they didn't want to punish the defendant. When I told them that there was a $1 million dollar insurance policy, some of the jurors literally burst into tears. They asked why they were not told this and were sad because there were two minor children and one adult child. They felt that they had let the boys down. I told them that the law doesn't allow insurance to come into evidence. Jurors should be told everything, but we can't. Insurance companies will never allow this to change.