Judy Williams v. State Farm Mutual Auto Insurance Co, 326008

Plaintiffs Judy Williams and Georgia Dillon sued State Farm for personal-injury/no-fault claims; this excerpt is Judge Ronayne Krause’s dissent addressing evidentiary rulings at trial.
At trial the court admitted evidence that Williams had been in prior minor-damage accidents and had previously filed lawsuits asserting injuries from those accidents.
The majority permitted admission of prior-accident evidence on non-character grounds (relevance to claimed injuries).
The controversy in the dissent is admission of Williams’s prior lawsuits (litigation history) as evidence of a tendency to malinger or litigiousness.
Judge Krause contends the prior-accident injury evidence was admissible, but the fact that Williams sued over those accidents added only impermissible evidence of litigiousness and impermissibly suggested propensity.

Issue	Plaintiff's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Admissibility of prior-accident evidence	Williams: prior accidents and claimed injuries are relevant to evaluate current injuries	State Farm: prior acts bear on credibility/propensity but are admissible for non-character uses	Prior-accident evidence is properly admissible for non-character, medical/causation purposes (dissent agrees)
Admissibility of evidence of prior lawsuits	Williams: lawsuit history is not probative of whether injury occurred and unfairly suggests litigiousness	State Farm: prior lawsuits show scheme/plan or pattern relevant to credibility/intent	Dissent: admission of prior lawsuits was improper — it served only to show litigiousness and was inadmissible under MRE 404(b) and 403
Whether admission of prior lawsuits might ever be permissible	Williams: generally inadmissible; minimally probative and highly prejudicial	State Farm: potentially relevant in rare contexts (e.g., ongoing animosity between parties)	Dissent: allows that rare contexts might exist, but this case was not one; admission was egregiously prejudicial
Harmless error analysis	Williams: admission was not harmless given prejudicial effect	State Farm: (implicit) any error was harmless amid other evidence	Dissent: error was not harmless and warrants reversal and remand for new trial

Edry v. Adelman, 486 Mich. 634 (Mich. 2010) (abuse-of-discretion standard for evidentiary rulings; preliminary admissibility reviewed de novo)
People v. Gursky, 486 Mich. 596 (Mich. 2010) (admission of legally inadmissible evidence is necessarily an abuse of discretion)
People v. VanderVliet, 444 Mich. 52 (Mich. 1993) (MRE 404(b) allows other-act evidence for non-character purposes)
People v. Crawford, 458 Mich. 376 (Mich. 1998) (other-act evidence admissible if it bears on matters other than character; must also pass relevance and 403 balancing)