An eighteen-year old named Jesse Tribble had a history of drug abuse. His mother, who had a prior history of drug dealing, gave him money when he told her that he wanted it to buy drugs. (She claimed she thought he was joking.) He then died of a drug overdose.
Obviously, a tragedy. And where there’s tragedy, there’s a lawsuit. In this case, Tribble’s father sued… Jack Whittaker, the man in whose house Tribble died. The theory? Whittaker didn’t supervise his 17-year old granddaughter adequately, and gave her too much money, so she might have bought the drugs with which Tribble overdosed.
The lawsuit settled last week. And you guessed it:
After the settlement was announced, Jimmy Tribble said his lawsuit was not about money but about getting the subpoenas to learn what led to his son’s death.
Conveniently, though, Tribble died at the home of a former Powerball winner, so even though it was really about information, according to media reports, “Money was involved in the settlement.” I wonder if Tribble’s parents would have been so eager to get answers if he had died in a janitor’s home.
Setting aside the fact that an 18-year old is apparently not responsible for his own choices, another disturbing aspect of the story is that nobody finds it remarkable that a lawsuit was purportedly filed solely to get information — as if a lawsuit were a therapy session rather than a method for assigning responsibility. (Of course, one may — and hopefully will — learn something in the course of a lawsuit, but information-gathering is not a legitimate purpose for a lawsuit.)
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Shouldn’t someone being suing the US Treasury for printing too much currency?
It must not be about the 26th Amendment either. If they are old enough to vote, they are old enough to be responsible for their own acts.
Of course litigation is used for discovery. If you are trying to find something out, and are being stonewalled, what other recourse is there?
In the site’s coverage of the “Litigation is Coercive” story (https://www.overlawyered.com/2007/03/litigation_is_coercive.html), the method used (admittedly, in that case, for an improper purpose) was a “Deposition Before Suit” under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 202.
A Rule 202 Petition can be filed to either (1) preserve deposition testimony (from, e.g., witnesses who may be close to death), or (2) to investigate whether you have a claim against the deponent or some other third party. The only relief available for a Rule 202 Petition is a deposition. It allows parties to investigate potential claims so that they don’t file frivolous (or, in the vocabulary of the Rules, “groundless,” “harassing,” or “bad faith”) claims.
This case and the one in San Antonio do not appear exactly as paragons of good faith or propriety. But lawsuit as means of discovery? Neither remarkable nor illegitimate.
Doug C: that last paragraph is my point. I don’t see even a pretense that there was a good faith belief in liability. Just an attempt to extract money combined with a veneer of information-seeking.
As the defendant’s granddaughter died of an overdoes some three months later, perhaps he should file against the parents as their failure to properly supervise their son led to his suicide that so upset his granddaughter, …..
But the post didn’t confine itself to stating or arguing that the claim shouldn’t be actionable. It focused on the parents’ motives for bringing suit. On that front, the post seems at war with itself. Suing with the objective of recovering damages is unacceptable because it smacks of greed. Suing with the objective of securing information is unacceptable because the proper objective of a lawsuit should be … what, recovering damages? If not that, then what *would* be an appropriate motivation for litigation?
Motivations may be fair grist for personal criticism of the litigants, but on that level, it’s unpersuasive to suggest that the parents would be incurious if their son had died at a janitor’s house. If the intended suggestion is actually that the parents didn’t care about their dead child and were simply exploiting their son’s death in cynical pursuit of a payday — well, that seems an over-the-top charge to level, if based on nothing more than the filing of a lawsuit (and I see no other basis for the charge here). Where’s the similar post on Fred Goldman?
Fred Goldman, it may be responded, had much better grounds to sue. But now we’re discussing the merits of the claims. Whether there was a good-faith basis for suit seems a slight change of subject, but in any event, there does appear to have been such as basis, in this case, as a matter of positive law: the claim made it to trial and settled only there. There may be arguments that it shouldn’t have — that motions for summary judgment were wrongly decided, that doctrine should be changed, etc. But the post doesn’t make them. It attacks the litigants’ motivations instead. From the post, I can’t even glean the legal theory under which the claims proceeded. The only cited source is a press article that doesn’t do much to explain the legal details either.
On the level of policy, speculating about people’s motives for filing litigation seems unproductive. People’s motives in bringing and defending litigation often are not pretty — and someone, somewhere, will find some motive to bring any lawsuit the system permits them to bring. The interesting policy question is which ones to permit, and how to weed out the undesirable ones, without extirpating the valid ones too.