§ 41.006.Award Specific to Defendant

One sentence, and it is the reason exemplary damages are never joint and several in Texas.

In any action with two or more defendants, an award of exemplary damages must be specific as to a defendant, and each defendant is liable only for the amount of the award made against that defendant.

The rule follows from what exemplary damages are for. They punish, and punishment is individual. A jury that finds one defendant grossly negligent and another merely negligent cannot express that through a single lump sum, and a defendant cannot be made to answer for a co-defendant's culpability.

The practical consequences run in both directions. The verdict form must carry a separate exemplary damages question for each defendant. The statutory cap is then applied separately to each award. And a claimant cannot collect one defendant's punitive award from a solvent co-defendant — the joint and several liability rules in the proportionate responsibility chapter operate on compensatory damages, not on this.

The section was renumbered from Section 41.005 in the 1995 rewrite of the chapter, which is why the numbering runs as it does.