Welcome to our Black Friday baseball special! (Sort of, at least for the baseball part.) Most of us think about shopping when we hear Black Friday mentioned, but in the context of this Skaggs trial update it takes on a whole different meaning.
At this point we all know the civil suit trial of late Los Angeles Angels Pitcher Tyler Skaggs isn’t going well for the Angels. The Skaggs family defense team seems to score significant legal points with each passing week, and some of the bizarre revelations and twists would be tough to make up, much less believe.
The latest twist might be the strangest turn of all. According to Sam Blum of The Athletic, attorneys for Debbie Hetman, Skaggs’ mother, posed some seemingly irrelevant questions about whether Hetman had ever communicated with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) about getting her late son’s iPad back. The specific attorney, Daniel Dutko, also wanted to know about the value of the iPad.
Hetman said she’d spoken with the DEA, but the agency had never returned the iPad, which was reportedly valued at approximately $2,000. This exchange might seem insignificant, but it turns out that legally the iPad is the opposite of that.
The device has come up frequently during the trial, and it's been brought up almost exclusively by the Skaggs family lawyers. It was the surface where Skaggs allegedly lined up his drugs before snorting them, and it was former Angels communication director Eric Kay who provided the fentanyl-laced pill that allegedly led to Skaggs death when he ingested it. Kay, of course, is currently serving a 22-year federal prison sentence for supplying the drugs that killed Skaggs.
Under California law, wrongful-death civil suits can’t include punitive damages. They can, however, result in damages that are awarded separately to survivors if the decedent suffered property damage. In California, this extra layer pertaining to property damage is a prerequisite for those separate damages.
The precedent here for the Skaggs defense team, is the OJ Simpson trial. The only property damages in that trial was done to the clothing of Nicole Simpson, who was the victim, but the jury awarded the Goldman estate $25 million in punitive damages.
Skaggs family lawyers want this precedent applied to their trial and the iPad. If this happens, it would open the door for potentially hundreds of millions in additional damages, and their argument centers on the contention that fentanyl was found on the iPad, and the DEA has yet to surrender the device back to the custody of Skaggs’ family.
The Angels defense is basically that whatever drugs were found were located on the cover of the iPad, not the device itself. The judge, the Honorable H. Shaina Colover, has ruled that this will be an issue for the jury to decide, but she’s already made some notable statements about this issue.
In rejecting the Angels’ motion for summary judgment prior to the start of the trial, the judge wrote, “As to whether the iPad suffered physical damage, evidence submitted by Plaintiffs shows that the iPad was covered in fentanyl and could not be forensically analyzed without chemical treatment, which would destroy the iPad.
“Further, despite her requests, the iPad was not returned to Carli [Skaggs' wife at the time] from the Drug Enforcement Agency because it was contaminated with fentanyl residue.”
All of this will be fair game for lawyers to bring up during the closing arguments, which the Skaggs family lawyers will almost certainly do, and the iPad could trigger millions in punitive damages against the Angels. According to Blum, it’s also possible that the language surrounding this topic will be included in instructions given to the jury before they deliberate.