Puritan Insurance v. Superior Court

Opinion

SIMS, J.

In this case we consider what discovery sanctions are appropriate where a party’s expert inadvertently loses an object of real evidence crucial to the litigation before an opposing party has had a chance to inspect or test the object. We conclude the party whose expert lost the object is properly precluded from introducing at trial expert testimony based on an examination of the lost object. However, authentic photographs of the object that are available to all parties, and expert testimony based exclusively on an examination of the photographs, should not be excluded from…