This week in St Louis Missouri after a two day jury trial a city jury awarded my client actual and punitive damages as a result of personal injury after a man intentionally drove his car into him.
In March 2006 after a disagreement the parties had about another issue Sikman walked to his car and verbally told Toroslu to get out of his way or he was going to run him down. Toroslu remained next to the vehicle asking Sikman to wait for the police to resolve their disagreement, however, Sikman got into his car, made a sharp left turn, and struck Toroslu knocking him to the ground.
Toroslu did not plan on filing a lawsuit against Sikman as he was not hurt that bad and only bruised and scraped. However, Sikman filed a lawsuit against Toroslu for battery and property damage claiming that Toroslu punched his car mirror wanting about $600 in damage and punitive damages. Therefore, it was only natural to file a counterclaim as part of defending a frivolous lawsuit.
Frivolous lawsuit is a term used a lot but in most cases it is used to describe a lawsuit that someone simply does not like and is actually not frivolous. People often put that stamp on lawsuit s that they disagree with despite having legal and factual merit.
The lawsuit filed by Mr. Sikman is a perfect example of a truly merit-less and frivolous lawsuit. Without any evidence, he claimed that the run down of my client never occurred and the mirror of his car was damaged as a result of Toroslu allegedly punching it. He had no witnesses to support his claim, and even better yet, after brief investigation I found four independent witnesses who all saw the incident and each and every one of them agreed with Toroslu's version of being intentionally run down by Sikman. But wait, it gets better! All the witnesses testified that Sikman tried to bribe them with cash and gifts to get them to testify in favor of him; what a piece of work.
Even after all of this evidence came out at trial, Sikman still allowed his claims to go to the jury, and of course, the jury rejected his claim against Toroslu. Additionally, we filed a counterclaim on behalf of Toroslu as part of the defense of this frivolous claim by Sikman, we stipulated to $1 in actual damages as Toroslu was hardly injured from the altercation; thus we were able to get a punitive damages award of $750; 750 times the actual damages of $1 that we claimed.
What is next? Sikman's lawyers have vowed to fight the punitive damages award and force Toroslu to spend more money on legal fees and expenses; over what? $750? it is crazy.
Based on the evidence presented at trial and the verdict reached by the jury, we now have an excellent malicious prosecution claim we will file on behalf of Toroslu seeking attorney fees spent on defending Sikman's obnoxious and patently frivolous claim and seek additional punitive damages for the malicious prosecution.
This is the deterrent the law has established to stop truly frivolous claims and allow a remedy for those that are maliciously prosecuted such as my client was in this case.
