SJI panel hits 40 year mark.

The Supreme Court Committee on Standard Jury Instructions in Civil Cases will celebrate its 40th anniversary early next year, and Chair Sylvia Walbolt said the panel takes pride in its work over the past four decades to advance the administration of justice in Florida by crafting instructions that directly reflect the law in the simplest language possible.

From its inception, the committee has been dedicated to increasing the legal accuracy of jury charges and eliminating argumentative language to avoid reversals, while trying to use understandable English to improve juror comprehension.

Before the creation of the SJI committee, jury instructions were drafted on a case-by-case basis. The attorneys for each side would submit a version of an instruction they wanted read to the jury and the judge would then choose from those instruction or write an instruction of his own, according to Robert P. Smith, Jr., who served on the committee from 1964 to 1989. That, Smith said was a time-consuming process which often resulted in instructions which were contradictory, confusing, or did not accurately state the law.

"It was typical for a trial judge to spend an hour or more at some point in the trial sitting down with lawyers in his chambers and, as they say, settling the jury charges," said Smith, who chaired the committee for 11 years.

"The court is confident that the forms of instructions recommended by the committee state as accurately as a group of experienced lawyers and judges could state the law of Florida in simple understandable language, the Supreme Court said in its 1967 opinion approving the first standard jury instructions prepared by the committee for use in civil negligence cases.

"We started with that simple negligence instruction... and have over the last 40 years continued to submit proposed instructions on a range of different claims, Walbolt said, including product liability, causation, damages, defamation, insurer's bad faith, civil theft, and many others. "We basically propose instructions in areas where we believe they would be useful, where there are enough cases -- and cases with enough similarities -- that you can use standard instructions."

Walbolt said the committee also proposes revisions to the standard instructions as the law changes to conform the instructions to those changes.

The court approved standard jury instructions are published by The Florida Bar and may be used by trial judges in charging the jury in every...

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