Mistrial — Refusal to grant motion for, not error, when — Improper verdict form, submitted to jury, withdrawn — New proper verdict form submitted with instructions.
Where on the back of a verdict form submitted by the judge to the jury in a personal injury action there appears the figures, thirty-five thousand (35,000), with a slant line through the last cipher, which is discovered by the jury during its deliberations in the jury room, and where there is no showing in the record that anyone connected with the parties, their counsel or the court had anything to do with the placing of the figures on the verdict form, and no showing in the record that the figures had any effect upon the verdict of the jury, it is not an abuse of discretion for the trial court to refuse to grant a motion for a mistrial where the court substitutes a new and proper verdict form and instructs the jury to resume its deliberations and "consider only the evidence and the law and nothing else" and "you shall not discuss the irregularity in the verdict form."
O'NEILL, J.
The single question to be decided by this court is: Was it an abuse of judicial discretion for the trial court to overrule the motion for mistrial which was based on the ground that there were the figures, thirty-five thousand (35,000), with a slant line through the last cipher on the back of the verdict form and that this constituted such an irregularity that it had a prejudicial effect upon the jury's verdict, where there is no showing in the record that anyone connected with the parties, their counsel or the court had anything to do with the placing of the figures on the verdict form and no showing in the record that the figures had any effect upon the verdict of the jury.
This court is of the opinion that the trial court judge did everything that was properly possible by submitting a new and proper verdict form to the jury and instructing the jury to disregard the figures on the back of the original verdict form and in further instructing the jury that the jury should not consider these figures in any way in its deliberations.
The trial judge did not abuse his discretion under these circumstances in refusing to grant a motion for a mistrial.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is hereby reversed, and the judgment of the Common Pleas Court is affirmed.
Judgment reversed.
TAFT, C.J., ZIMMERMAN, MATTHIAS, GRIFFITH, HERBERT and GIBSON, JJ., concur.