Background
In March 2010, Julie DeOliveira and her then-minor daughter Maxine were involved in a motor vehicle accident on Interstate 95 South in Cranston, Rhode Island, when Julie’s car collided with a tractor-trailer operated by Greg Trecaso. The parties disputed who was at fault: the DeOliveiras maintained that Trecaso merged into their lane from an on-ramp, while Trecaso testified that Julie’s car had its right turn signal on and drifted into his lane. The Rhode Island State Police trooper who investigated the accident, Trooper Lisa Hanley, determined that Julie’s vehicle was changing lanes at the time of impact. Julie sued both Trecaso and Star Insurance Company, his insurer. Trecaso was eventually dismissed for failure of service, leaving Star as the sole defendant.
After more than a decade of litigation, a four-day jury trial was held in September 2023 in Providence County Superior Court. The jury found that neither plaintiff proved by a fair preponderance of the evidence that Star (through Trecaso) was negligent. Plaintiffs filed a motion for new trial, raising eleven alleged trial errors. The trial justice denied the motion, and plaintiffs appealed. Star cross-appealed from the denial of its motion for judgment as a matter of law, but the Supreme Court declined to reach the cross-appeal.
The Court’s Holding
The Rhode Island Supreme Court affirmed in an opinion by Justice Long, rejecting all eleven of plaintiffs’ assignments of error. Several rulings are of particular significance to Rhode Island litigators.
Deposition of dismissed defendant (Rule 32). The trial court admitted a videotaped deposition of Trecaso, who had been dismissed from the case for failure of service, under Rule 32 of the Superior Court Rules of Civil Procedure. Plaintiffs argued that dismissal divested the court of personal jurisdiction over Trecaso and barred use of his deposition. The Supreme Court affirmed: Rule 32 governs the admissibility of depositions and plaintiffs did not demonstrate that the trial court’s admission of the deposition—at portions selected by plaintiffs themselves during trial—constituted an abuse of discretion.
Google Earth photographs. Star introduced Google Earth aerial photographs of the accident scene, authenticated through the testimony of Trooper Hanley that they accurately depicted the highway as it existed in 2010. Plaintiffs argued the photographs required expert authentication of the underlying data and software. The Supreme Court disagreed, distinguishing cases like United States v. Espinal-Almeida (GPS-derived edited map) and Odom v. State (third-party location software data superimposed on aerial image) because those cases involved significantly more complex computer-processed evidence. Here, the photographs were bare, unedited images of a highway, and the investigating trooper’s personal knowledge of the scene qualified her to authenticate them. Moreover, defense counsel’s representation at trial that the photographs were “from April 30, 2010” went unchallenged.
Police report questions not expert testimony. Plaintiffs objected that several questions asked of Trooper Hanley during cross-examination improperly elicited expert opinion. The Court disagreed: a trooper reading the narrative of her own accident report (admitted as a full exhibit) and confirming what it stated did not require specialized knowledge—it was lay testimony about the contents of a document already in evidence. The Court also applied the waiver doctrine to a withdrawn question that plaintiffs had nonetheless appealed.
Empty chair doctrine not violated by burden-of-proof comment. During closing argument, defense counsel noted that plaintiffs “had the burden of proof” but “called no experts.” Plaintiffs argued this invoked the empty chair doctrine—which allows a factfinder to draw an adverse inference from a party’s unexplained failure to call an available material witness—and required a cautionary instruction. The Court rejected the argument on two grounds: plaintiffs waived any claim to a cautionary instruction by failing to request one before the jury retired, and the empty chair doctrine applies only where there is evidence that a party had an available witness and failed to call that witness. Defense counsel’s comment was a permissible comment on the burden of proof, not an improper empty-chair inference.
Verdict sheet and new trial. Plaintiffs objected to the verdict sheet’s phrasing asking whether Star “was negligent” rather than “had any negligence,” arguing the former implied the jury had to find 100% fault. The Court rejected this reading because the verdict form as a whole included follow-on questions expressly requiring the jury to apportion fault by percentages—making clear that a finding less than total liability was permissible. On the new trial motion, the trial justice had properly evaluated the credibility of all witnesses, found Julie’s testimony inconsistent and her daughter’s equivocal, given limited weight to an anonymous 911 caller who admitted uncertainty about what happened, and concluded the verdict was not against the weight of the evidence.
Key Takeaways
- A dismissed defendant’s videotaped deposition is admissible under Superior Court Rule 32 in the absence of a showing that its admission constituted a clear abuse of discretion; dismissal for lack of service does not automatically bar use of prior deposition testimony.
- Bare, unedited internet photographs of a public location (highway, intersection, etc.) can be authenticated under Rhode Island evidence rules by any lay witness with personal knowledge of the location at the relevant time—expert authentication of the underlying platform is not required unless the images have been enhanced or derived from specialized data sources.
- Under Rhode Island’s empty chair doctrine, a comment on a party’s failure to call any expert is permissible as a comment on burden of proof—the doctrine is triggered only when a specific available witness was identifiable and the party inexplicably failed to call them.
- A verdict sheet asking whether a defendant “was negligent” does not mislead jurors into requiring 100% liability when the overall form instructs them to apportion fault among parties in follow-up questions.
Why It Matters
DeOliveira v. Trecaso provides Rhode Island trial practitioners with a concise reference point on several frequently litigated evidentiary and procedural issues. The Google Earth authentication ruling is practically significant given the ubiquity of aerial and street-level images in modern civil litigation: an investigating officer, first responder, or any other witness with personal knowledge of the relevant location can authenticate an unedited platform photograph without retaining a digital-forensics expert, as long as the exhibit is not derived from or altered by proprietary data overlays. The empty chair doctrine holding is equally useful—defense counsel in cases where plaintiff bears the burden and calls no expert is free to comment on that strategic choice without invoking the adverse-inference machinery, and plaintiffs who object but then fail to request a curative instruction before deliberations have waived any remedy on appeal. Across all eleven issues, the opinion reinforces that Rhode Island’s abuse-of-discretion standard gives trial justices wide latitude on evidentiary and procedural rulings, and that a motion for new trial on sufficiency grounds requires demonstrating that the trial justice misconceived or overlooked material evidence—not merely that the jury could have weighed the evidence differently.