§ 9-12-8.Amendment of verdict — When part illegal

A jury's verdict does not have to be entirely valid or entirely thrown out — it can be partly one and partly the other. When a verdict is legal in part and illegal in part, this section has the court sort the two apart rather than discarding the whole thing.

The mechanism is a remittitur: the court construes the verdict, identifies the illegal portion, and orders it stricken through the remittitur, leaving judgment to be entered for what remains. The legal balance of the verdict survives and becomes the basis for the judgment, even though part of what the jury found could not stand.

This is the same instinct that runs through the rest of the article's approach to imperfect verdicts — read them generously, fix what can be fixed, and reserve avoidance for cases where nothing else works. Here, that instinct produces a targeted edit rather than a wholesale rejection, and the judgment that follows conforms to the verdict as trimmed.