Do Juries Get to See Car Wreck Photographs, in Las Vegas Car Accident Cases?

Is it possible to stop pictures of a car that has been in an accident from coming into evidence at trial?  The short answer is that it depends. The admissibility of photographs in Las Vegas car accident cases is highly fought over issue in litigated car accident cases. Although the  Nevada Supreme Court has not decided this issue, other Courts exclude photographs when no expert testimony is introduced linking the vehicles’ property damage to the injuries from the person hurt in the car accident.  

So, in Nevada, it is left up to the individual judge deciding your case, whether they allow the jury to see photographs.  Why is this issue so important?  Because, when juries see only a scratched bumper, they tend to think a person could not have possibly been injured in the accident.  This is a false assumption. This hurts people who have been injured in minor property damage car accidents, preventing them from getting the compensation they deserve. 

In a 2008  “unpublished” opinion (which means it is an advisory and not mandatory law) out of a New Jersey court, in  Twal v. Hinds, 2008 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 2666 (2008), the New Jersey court excluded the car wreck photographs.  The New Jersey Court felt that the car accident pictures would prevent the injured party from getting a fair shake at trial.   The legal jargon for this is that the pictures were “more prejudicial than probative”.   The court reasoned that there was a lack of evidence  to support the defendant’s argument that a relationship existed between the vehicle damage and the injured person’s injuries. This helps the person injured in a Las Vegas car accident. 

Common sense may tell us that if a car was barely damaged in an auto accident, then a person could barely have been injured.  However, common sense also tells us that when we step outside and look at the horizon, that the earth is flat.  Now, we all know that our senses deceive us, and the earth is actually round.  The same principle applies to damage to cars in car accident cases.  Our senses deceive us. The amount of property damage to a car involved in an accident has nothing to do with personal injuries someone can suffer in a car accident. 

Delaware has also agreed with the New Jersey approach and doesn’t allow photographs of cars to come into evidence, for the jury to speculate on injuries. In the case of Davis v. Maute, 770 A.2d 36, 40 (Del. 2001), the court said that“[a]s a general rule, a party in a personal injury case may not directly argue that the seriousness of personal injuries from a car accident correlates to the extent of the damage to the cars, unless the party can produce competent expert testimony on this issue”.

The Supreme Court of Delaware explained that “[a]bsent such expert testimony, any inference by the jury that minimal damage to the Plaintiff’s car translates into minimal personal injuries to the Plaintiff would necessarily amount to unguided speculation.”  Davis, 770 A.3d at 40.  

Similar to New Jersey and Delware, New York has come to the same conclusion that car accident photos cannot tell the story of a person’s injuries in an accident.   In the New York case of Clemente v. Blumenberg, 183 Misc.2d 923, 934 705 N.Y.S.2d 792 (1999), the court rightly concluded that “using repair costs and photographs as a method for calculating the change in velocity of two vehicles at impact is nota generally accepted method in any relevant field of engineering or under the laws of physics”. Because not even experts can come to such conclusions, allowing jurors to do so invites naked speculation based upon “common sense”.

What is interesting about these types of cases, is that the person causing the car crash, almost always admits they were at fault for the car wreck.  The case is then what are the extent of injured person’s injuries.  To top it off, the injured party has almost always been paid for the damage to their car.   So, with the property damage decided and paid for, the pictures of the property damage are completely irrelevant at trial.

Since the Nevada Supreme Court nor the State legislature have not made an actual law on whether car accidentphotos come into evidence in a Las Vegas jury trial, it is up to the judge who is hearing the case to decide it the pictures come in.  As you can imagine, each judge can decide the issue differently.

Next time we will discuss what happens when your car is a total loss and you owe more on it that it is worth.