Rule 53.3.Motion to correct error: time limitation for ruling

A motion to correct error is the standard way an Indiana litigant asks the trial court to fix a mistake before appealing. Trial Rule 53.3 keeps that motion from stalling a case indefinitely. If the court fails for forty-five days to set the motion for a hearing, or fails to rule within thirty days after a hearing, or within forty-five days after filing when no hearing is required, the motion is deemed denied — no one has to ask for anything, and no order or notice from the clerk is needed to make it happen.

This is a different mechanism from the one in Trial Rule 53.1 and Trial Rule 53.2. Those rules let a party pull the case away from a slow judge and send it to a special judge. Trial Rule 53.3 does something narrower: it treats the unruled-on motion as denied so the case can move forward on appeal, without removing the judge or transferring the case at all. Once the motion is deemed denied, the party who filed it has thirty days to start an appeal by filing a notice of appeal under Appellate Rule 9(A).

Two things keep the deemed-denial from kicking in. The parties who’ve appeared, or their counsel, can agree on the record that the time limit won’t apply. And the judge before whom the motion is pending can extend the ruling deadline by up to thirty days, so long as the judge puts the extension in writing, notes it in the Chronological Case Summary before the original deadline expires, and serves it on every party. Beyond that single extension, the rule allows a further extension only through an application to the Supreme Court, following the same process available under the other lazy-judge rules.

As with the related delay rules, a court is treated as having set a hearing, or ruled, on whatever date that action is noted in the Chronological Case Summary — so the paper record of the case, not anyone’s private recollection, controls when the clock started and stopped.