Wednesday, December 3, 2025
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Attorney’s Misconduct Warranted Judge Upsetting $1 Million-Plus Jury Verdict in Battery Case—C.A.
By a MetNews Staff Writer
A lawyer’s misconduct—principally, telling a jury in the opening statement that the plaintiff suffers from incontinence and other gastrointestinal problems stemming from being manhandled by a hotel owner when there was no expert witness who would show causation—justified a judge’s action scrapping an award of more than $1 million in compensatory damages and granting a new trial, Div. Two of the Fourth District Court of Appeal has declared.
Committing the misconduct was Rancho Cucamonga attorney Michael K. Blue.
The unpublished opinion, filed Monday, snatches from plaintiff Brenda Lee Allen a $1,051,200 verdict in her lawsuit against Anil Bhula Patel, proprietor of the Ontario Airport Inn Hotel, based on an April 19, 2020 incident. Jurors found Patel liable on causes of action for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Justice Carol D. Codrington authored the opinion affirming San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Michael A. Sachs’s order granting a new trial on liability and compensatory damages. That, the jurist said, renders moot Allen’s appeal from an order dismissing the jury before it could consider punitive damages at the bifurcated trial.
The jurist noted that before trial, Sachs “asked Blue if there would be evidence offered by an expert showing causation linking Allen’s GI claims with the Hotel incident, and Blue told the court, yes, which was false.”
She wrote: “Although the record shows that Blue did not make an express promise to introduce expert witness testimony or other evidence establishing causation, there is substantial evidence supporting a reasonable finding that Blue knowingly misled the trial court into believing that Blue would introduce expert testimony establishing causation.”
Codrington added: “We further conclude that such misconduct was prejudicial because it is reasonably probable defendant would have achieved a more favorable result in the absence of the prolific, graphic, inflammatory incontinence evidence.”
The case is Allen v. Patel, E082051.
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