Civil trials, a term that includes just about everything except trials involving criminal prosecutions, are governed by a detailed set of rules known, logically enough, as the Rules of Civil Procedure.

These rules have been evolving for hundreds of years, and continue to evolve. Their stated purpose is to “secure the just, speedy and inexpensive determination of every action.”

One of the rules (Rule 59 for purists) is intended to give a civil trial judge limited tools to correct how a trial ended if the judge concludes, after the dust settles a bit, that something about the proceeding wasn’t quite right. These tools include ordering a new trial, on some or all of the issues.

As you might expect, there are restrictions on when a new trial can be ordered and, in a case recently decided by the Colorado Supreme Court, Rains v. Frascona, those restrictions were in dispute.

The tragedy that triggered this litigation occurred Aug. 21, 2014. Oliver Frascona, a well-known and highly respected Colorado attorney and leading expert on residential real estate law, was attempting to land a private plane at the Erie Municipal Airport, a facility with no manned air traffic control.

Joseph Lechtanski was attempting to take off in the opposite direction on the same runway. To avoid a head-on collision, Frascona aborted his landing but his plane stalled and crashed, killing Frascona and a friend, Tori Rains-Wedan, and her three children. Lechtanski survived the near miss.

After the crash, Tori Rains-Wedan’s father and her ex-husband, as the father of her three children, both of whom were heirs of the decedents, filed a negligence lawsuit against Frascona and Lechtanski, seeking damages. After a multiday trial, the jury found that neither Frascona nor Lechtanski had been negligent, and therefore it awarded no damages.

The plaintiffs then filed a successful motion with the trial court judge asking for a new trial. Using a narrow and expedited procedure, the defendants asked the Supreme Court to review this decision. The Supreme Court ruled that the trial court judge was wrong — and had abused his discretion — in ordering a new trial.

The trial court judge, in granting the plaintiffs’ new trial motion, said he felt the evidence in the case did not support the jury’s verdict that neither pilot was negligent. He said “the undisputed facts must result in a verdict implicating one or both pilots as the negligent cause of the crash. The finding of no liability as to both pilots is … a miscarriage of justice.”

The Supreme Court, however, held that a trial court judge’s conclusion that a jury got it wrong, resulting in a perceived “miscarriage of justice,” was not grounds for the judge to grant a new trial.

Only the specific grounds listed in Rule 59 can justify ordering a new trial. One of those grounds, and the one in controversy in this case, is an “irregularity in the proceedings by which any party was prevented from having a fair trial.” As the Supreme Court noted in its opinion, prior court decisions have greatly limited the meaning of this term and a trial court judge’s disagreement with a jury verdict does not qualify as an “irregularity.”

So, for the moment at least, there will be no new trial in this case. The plaintiffs, however, still can appeal the trial court verdict to the Colorado Court of Appeals and, although the odds are long, that court could set aside the verdict and order a new trial.

A just determination? Maybe. A speedy and inexpensive determination? Probably not.

Jim Flynn is with the Colorado Springs firm of Flynn & Wright LLC. Contact him at moneylaw@jtflynn.com. “Best of Jim Flynn’s Money & the Law” is now available at amazon.com — paperback or e-book.