Updating our Nov. 23, 2003 item: By an 8-1 margin, the Washington Supreme Court “has swept aside an $8.3 million civil judgment against the state for the vicious beating in 1999 of a Somali refugee by a group of teenagers living in a West Seattle foster home.” The court ruled that while a state agency overseeing foster care is under a legal duty to protect children placed in care, it does not have a duty to safeguard members of the general public from the children. (Peter Lewis, “Court says state isn’t liable for crimes by foster kids”, Seattle Times, Feb. 17; decision/ concurrence/ dissent in Said Aba Sheikh v. Kevin S. Choe et al; video of oral argument on TVW).
In a December piece for the WSJ I wrote critically about the way earlier court decisions in Washington state have left the state’s taxpayers unusually exposed to damage claims over crimes that the state should allegedly have done more to prevent. The new decision may indicate (or so we can hope, anyway) that the state’s high court is increasingly aware of the downside of such wide-open liability.
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Teenage assault: the taxpayers did it
“A King County jury [last week] awarded a Somali refugee $8.8 million, finding that negligence by state social workers contributed to a savage assault by a gang of teenagers living in a West Seattle foster…
When I was in college in Washington DC, I met a 17-year old girl whose mother had abandoned her (mother moved to france, father not in the picture since the girl was 5). the girl was working a full-time job to pay for school. Since she was underage, I tried to jump through the hoops of DC govt to get her declared a ward of the state, so she could get tuition assistance. Short story – yes, she’s eligible but protective services will be damned if they’ll do their jobs without a court order. Since the girl didn’t want to get arrested (for what? Doesn’t matter to us) in order to get the paperwork rolling, we gave up.