Articles Posted in Trial

If you are in a car accident, slip and fall, or are injured in any other accident and your case goes to trial in Miami-Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach, we will want to cross-examine the Defendant at trial. But what if he or she didn’t show up? While it may seem odd, it happens. A Defendant may have an insurance company who they drop their case on. They may have a family emergency. They may have a commitment to a higher authority such as military, government, or otherwise. Or, they may just try to duck the whole thing. So, what happens if the Defendant doesn’t come to trial?  

As long as it is not a self-procured failure to attend and the Defendant is more than 100 miles away, the Trial Court has the discretion to allow the Defendant’s lawyer to read his or her client’s deposition to the jury. That means that, as long as the Defendant didn’t purposely cause his or her absence or not being there, then the Court could let the Defendant’s lawyer read his or her deposition at trial.  

That’s what happened in the case of Hutchings v. Liles, 2012 Okaloosa County. In that case, the defense counsel provided an affidavit showing his failed efforts to find the defendant for several weeks before trial and asserted that the Defendant had taken a job out of state with a federal military agency. Defendant had told her lawyer that she didn’t know whether she would be able to contact her attorney while on assignment. Her lawyer had been unable to obtain any information from her boss about where Defendant was located. Being called away for a valid reason was enough to establish the Defendant Deponent’s absence was not self-procured.