Non-economic damages family California juries award in wrongful death cases are inherently subjective. There is no invoice for a father's hug, no receipt for the comfort a parent provides a child at 2 a.m. after a nightmare. Yet California law asks juries to assign a dollar figure to exactly that kind of loss, and the outcome of a wrongful death trial frequently turns on how well counsel translates an intangible relationship into evidence a jury can act on. A $34 million verdict returned against a public entity, on facts where liability was fully admitted before trial, offers a clean example of how non-economic damages get proven when the entire case comes down to valuing loss.
CACI 3921
Jury instruction defining non-economic wrongful death damages
2 decades
Span of photographs that corroborated the relationship
CACI No. 3921 instructs juries to consider the loss of love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, and moral support the heirs have lost and will lose because of the decedent's death. None of these categories are quantifiable through documents alone. They require testimony, corroborating evidence, and a narrative structure that helps a jury understand the texture of a specific relationship rather than a generic description of parental love. Because the standard is inherently subjective, defense counsel frequently try to attack the plaintiffs' credibility or paint the decedent in an unflattering light, exactly the dynamic that played out when a defendant, having admitted full liability, spent the damages phase trying to use the decedent's history of addiction and homelessness to suggest his relationships carried diminished value.
Several categories of evidence proved decisive in overcoming that defense strategy, and they translate directly to any case where non-economic damages family California claimants seek to recover. The strongest records combine objective corroboration that a jury cannot dismiss as self-serving with specific, first-person testimony from each claimant, and they confront the decedent's hardest facts head on rather than leaving them for the defense to introduce first.
A record of photographs showing a parent with children across many years and settings provides objective, non-testimonial corroboration. A pattern of images showing a parent engaging multiple children in a shared, happy moment, repeated across years, tells a story that generic verbal description cannot match.
Each heir's testimony should focus on specific, concrete memories rather than abstract characterizations. A juror is more likely to credit a particular ritual or a distinctive trait of the relationship than a repeated, generalized statement that the parent was a good father.
Acknowledging the decedent's struggles honestly and reframing the question, whether the relationships he built despite those struggles had real and substantial value, works better than a sanitized narrative that opposing counsel can attack as incomplete.
When several heirs testify independently and describe different specific memories that converge on a consistent picture of a present, loving parent, that convergence becomes powerful evidence in its own right.
The case behind this page
The full account of a pure damages trial and the $34 million result.
Read the full caseRelated strategy
How a case reaches eight figures even when a traditional earnings claim is weak.
The earnings strategyRelated breakdowns from this case and our wrongful death practice.
We take wrongful death cases with significant non-economic loss as counsel or co-counsel and pay statutory referral fees.
Refer a caseNon-economic damages in a California wrongful death case include the loss of the decedent's love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, and moral support, as described in CACI No. 3921.
Yes, non-economic damages are proven independently of a decedent's income or economic contribution, and a case built primarily on relationship evidence can still result in a substantial verdict.
Photographic history, specific and concrete first-person testimony from each heir, and corroboration from third parties who observed the relationship are among the most persuasive forms of evidence for proving loss of love and companionship.
