Hitt v. Connell

A jury believed him. It awarded him money for what the ordeal did to his mind. Then the Fifth Circuit read the record and erased that part of the verdict down to nothing, while leaving his lost wages untouched. The difference was not the law of liability. It was proof.

The rule the court enforced

Mental anguish is real, and it is compensable, but it is not free. The Fifth Circuit requires a specific, discernible injury to the plaintiff's emotional state, shown with evidence of its nature and extent. Hurt feelings, anger, and frustration are not enough. Conclusory testimony that a person felt bad is not enough. A plaintiff's own words can carry the day, but only if they are particularized and extensive, and better still when something corroborates them: a treating professional, a spouse, a documented change in how the person lives.

Why the award fell

Hitt won on the merits and still lost the anguish, because his account of the harm was thin. Vague, conclusory, uncorroborated. The court had done the same in the cases it leaned on, Patterson v. P.H.P. Healthcare and Brady v. Fort Bend County. The pattern is consistent, and it is a warning. A sympathetic client and a true injury do not survive appeal on adjectives.

The lesson at the table

This is not a defense case or a plaintiff's case. It is a craft case. The anguish element is won in the building of the record, long before the charge: the specifics, the duration, the before and the after, and every witness and document that turns a feeling into a fact the court can hold. The stronger the objective backbone under the testimony, the harder it is for a cold appellate record to call it conclusory. Prove the nature and extent, or watch the number go to zero on a page you never got to argue.

Hitt v. Connell, 301 F.3d 240 (5th Cir. 2002). Read the opinion. The mental-anguish standard it applies comes from Patterson v. P.H.P. Healthcare Corp., 90 F.3d 927 (5th Cir. 1996), and Brady v. Fort Bend County, 145 F.3d 691 (5th Cir. 1998).