Civil Jury Charge: The Plaintiff/Defendant Self-Correction

I would record the sequence as spoken: “the plaintiff-excuse me, the defendant-has the burden of proving contributory negligence by a preponderance of the evidence.” The later statement, “For the record, the court has corrected the first paragraph to say defendant, not plaintiff,” is also part of the record and should appear where it was spoken. It confirms the judge’s intended charge, but it does not erase the oral slip. The jury heard both the mistake and the correction, and an appellate court may need to know exactly what was said. Silently replacing the sequence with only “the defendant has the burden” would create a clean charge that was never delivered and would conceal the self-correction. If the court later settles or corrects the written charge, that is a separate document; the reporter’s record preserves the spoken event. The controlling principle is that jury-charge exactness requires capturing both the error and the correction, not choosing the judge’s likely intent.

I would write what the judge said: “Code of Civil Procedure section 337.1.” The printed page is not the source of the spoken record. The symbol “§” is a transcription convention for “section,” but the judge uttered the word “section,” so substituting the symbol would change the spoken form. The number “337.1” can stand in conventional citation form because it preserves the statutory subdivision; I would not expand it to “three hundred thirty-seven point one” unless the judge spelled it out that way or the court’s style guide required word-for-word number rendering. The governing principle is that abbreviations and symbols serve the spoken words, not the other way around. In a jury charge, citations matter, but verbatim accuracy matters more: the record should show what the jury actually heard. If the judge had said “section three three seven point one,” I would still render the number as “337.1” under normal number style, but I would not import the printed “§” from the page.

In the moment, I would keep capturing the ongoing charge. At 180 wpm, stopping to repair the earlier phrase risks losing the next element of the charge, which is worse than a local error. If a single-stroke correction is available and the next phrase is predictable, I might insert “excuse me” quickly; otherwise I would preserve continuity and rely on the judge’s later on-record statement. After the charge, I would not silently rewrite the live output. I would notify the judge or clerk that the record as captured omits the self-correction and request an on-record clarification, or follow the tribunal’s errata procedure. The judge’s later “For the record” statement helps, but if my transcript shows only “plaintiff has the burden” and then a correction to “defendant,” the record is internally inconsistent. The best practice is to flag the discrepancy promptly and let the court correct the record on the record, rather than fabricate the missing words or conceal the problem.