State police said 17-year-old Stephen Pappadake was doing 80 mph in a 30 mph zone one morning last April in Somers, N.Y. when he illegally passed several cars in a no-passing zone, lost control of his car, swerved to avoid another vehicle, and was killed in the resulting crash of his Honda sedan. “But a lawsuit filed this month in Putnam County Court seeks to place the blame for Pappadake’s death on the driver of one of the vehicles he passed. The suit, filed on behalf of Pappadake’s estate and his parents, Robert P. and Nancy Pappadake, names a Putnam Valley woman who allegedly drove a Jeep Cherokee that Pappadake passed as the cause of the fatal crash. The lawsuit, filed by attorney Mitchel H. Ashley of the Manhattan firm of Shandell, Blitz, Blitz and Bookson, makes no mention of the police finding that Pappadake was speeding and passing cars illegally before the fatal crash. Instead, it blames Putnam Valley residents Christina Swartzwelder, who was driving the Jeep, and John Swartzwelder, who owns it.” (Terry Corcoran, “Fatal crash prompts lawsuit”, New York Journal News (Westchester County, N.Y.), Feb. 1)
Posts Tagged ‘personal responsibility’
“OK, so I won’t sue cable firm”
Updating Wisconsin’s tempest in a cable box (see Jan. 7): “A man who blamed a cable TV company for his television addiction and his wife’s 50-pound weight gain said Thursday he won’t follow through with a threat to sue the cable operator. In an unusual news conference held in the basement of his West Bend home,” Timothy Dumouchel insisted that cable TV provider Charter was to blame for his family’s addiction to its televised fare, because it had failed to cut off service as requested, but said most of his dealings with the company had been pleasant and that he would not pursue legal action. Dumouchel also “said he never claimed his three children — ages 30, 23 and 16 — were lazy. He also said he knows people are snickering about him, and that his wife was angry about his statements on her weight gain.” (Lauria Lynch-German, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Jan. 9; “Man won?t sue over TV addiction”, AP/Appleton Post-Crescent, Jan. 9).
By reader acclaim: Addicted by cable TV
Parody, or just the next logical step? Timothy Dumouchel of West Bend, Wis. says he plans to sue cable TV provider Charter “because his cable connection remained intact four years after he tried to get it canceled. The result was that he and his family got free cable from August of 1999 to Dec. 23, 2003. ‘I believe that the reason I smoke and drink every day and my wife is overweight is because we watched TV every day for the last four years,’ Dumouchel stated in a written complaint against the company, included in a Fond du Lac police report.” (Lee Reinsch, “Man says he’s addicted to cable; wants to sue Charter”, Fond du Lac Reporter, Jan. 7) Update Jan. 13: he says he won’t sue.
Fishing lure “harmful if swallowed”, and more wacky warning labels
The warning against ingesting the five-inch fishing lure, which sports three steel hooks, is just one of the winners in Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch’s Seventh Annual Wacky Warning Labels awards. Another: “a 12-inch-high storage rack for compact disks which warns: ‘Do not use as a ladder.'” (more on warning labels; and see Dec. 9)
Update: Aussie drunk driver loses case
Updating our Jul. 30 report: “A woman has lost a case in which she sued a pub where she had been drinking shortly before she crashed her car. …Justice Gerald Cripps said the defendants did not have a duty of care ‘to protect the plaintiff from the consequences of her own inebriation’.” (“Judge finds against drunk driver who sued hotel”, AAP/Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 18)(opinion in Parrington v Hotelcorp Pty Ltd & Ors, New South Wales Supreme Court)
ATLA: Avoid jurors with “strong religious beliefs”
CNSNews.com reports that an American Trial Lawyers Association publication, “ATLA’s Litigating Tort Cases,” an $800 manual advertised as “the inside track to establishing and maintaining a successful tort practice,” recommends quizzing jurors on their religious beliefs during the “voir dire” procedure meant to exclude biased jurors.
The chapter classifies certain individuals as “personal responsibility” jurors. “The personal responsibility jurors tend to espouse traditional family values.” Often, “these jurors have strong religious beliefs.” Because “personal responsibility jurors” hold values such as “People should be self-reliant, responsible, and self-disciplined. When people act irresponsibly and are not self-disciplined, there are consequences. People must be accountable for their conduct,” they may not be sufficiently sympathetic to the plaintiffs.
Thus, “the only solution is to identify these jurors during voir dire and exclude them from the jury.”
A spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State objects: “‘Certainly a good lawyer will try to ferret out any evidence of prejudice, whether it’s religious prejudice or racial prejudice, prejudice against women, whatever, that’s legitimate,’ [Rob] Boston said. ‘But, for a lawyer to simply assume that certain religious beliefs will dictate certain behaviors is naive and I think it does a disservice to our legal system.'” (Jeff Johnson, “Trial Lawyers Question Jurors’ ‘Strong Religious Beliefs'”, CNSNews.com, Dec. 18).
Alas, the article uncomfortably and unnecessarily singles out the Judaism of the author of the book chapter in question. But the identification of trial lawyers’ strategy in such bald terms provides interesting insight.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers are fond of accusing tort reformers of attempting to remove certain decisions from “the people”. But under the current tort system, jurors in many cases are not so much “the people” as a hand-picked group selected to favor a certain result. When one combines this biased sampling with random variation, and then combine that with the possibility of jackpot damages awards, it takes only a small minority of “the people” to create a jury pool that creates dramatic shifts in wealth to lawyers from the rest of society.
Update: Daytrader rampage suit
Mark Orrin Barton, like the overwhelming majority of day traders, lost money — approximately half a million dollars during the boom market of 1998-99. Unlike most losing day traders, Barton reacted by showing up at the day-trading offices and murdering nine people and wounding twelve before killing himself. The victims tried to hold the day trading firms liable, on the theory that day-trading companies are committing torts against their customers by letting them choose to lose money, thus causing them to snap. (See Jan. 9-10, 2002). The Georgia court of appeals has affirmed a summary judgment against such ludicrous claims–but in part because there had been no previous crime at the firm, which makes one wonder whether such an attenuated theory of causation might flower in the future. (Richmond Eustis, “Day Trader Firms Ruled Not Liable for Rampage”, Fulton County Daily Report, Dec. 19) (via Bashman). Curiously, a true-crime writer on the web quotes one of the wounded plaintiffs as saying “You can’t blame it on day trading.”
Pay me for driving drunk, cont’d
“The wife of a hockey fan who crashed his car after drinking too much at a Minnesota Wild game has sued the team, saying her husband shouldn’t have been served so much alcohol.” (“Wife sues Minnesota Wild for husband’s crash”, AP/CNN, Dec. 13)(more tipple-your-way-to-court cases).
Abuses “laughing gas”, sues over crash
Florida: “A teenage girl who got into a serious car crash [after she and a] friend inhaled nitrous oxide has sued the video store that allegedly sold cartridges. … Palm Beach County Sheriff’s investigations have not linked the crash to nitrous use.” A manager at the video store said the teen’s “parents are looking for a scapegoat, they don’t want to take responsibility for their own children’s actions.” (“Brain-damaged Boca Raton girl sues alleged nitrous seller”, AP/Sarasota Herald Tribune, Dec. 11).
McDonald’s coffee revisited
Professor Bernstein (also here) and the “Curmudgeonly Clerk” trade thoughts on the infamous McDonald’s coffee case ($2.9 million verdict for Ms. Stella Liebeck, who spilled a 49-cent coffee on herself), with the Curmudgeonly Clerk’s comments demonstrating how thoroughly the plaintiffs’ bar has infiltrated societal thinking.
The Clerk justifies the verdict on a couple of grounds: McDonald’s had 700 previous complaints; and Ms. Liebeck suffered horrific injuries.
To say that there were 700 previous complaints of burns (ranging from scalds to real injuries) from McDonald’s coffee begs the question. After all, 700 is just the numerator. What’s the denominator? The answer is in the tens of billions. A product that hurts one in twenty-four million people is not “unreasonably dangerous”, especially when the vast majority of the 700 incidents were not the sort of grievous injuries Ms. Liebeck had. (McDonald’s had settled previous cases, but the cases were incidents where the McDonald’s employees had spilled the coffee.) However, the jury took the 1-in-24 million statistic not as evidence that McDonald’s coffee was not dangerous, but as evidence that McDonald’s cared more about statistics than people — when in fact the statistic should have been used to throw the case out.
That Ms. Liebeck was surely serious hurt doesn’t change the underlying problem with the lawsuit: Ms. Liebeck was hurt because she spilled coffee on herself. If (as all fast-food restaurants do now) McDonald’s had the obvious statement “Coffee is hot and can burn you” on the cup (a juror later complained that McDonald’s warning was too small), would that have prevented her injuries? True: McDonald’s could have served luke-warm coffee or even iced coffee. But at the end of the day, the proximate cause of Ms. Liebeck’s injuries, as awful as they were, was Ms. Liebeck.
The argument for liability is that McDonald’s chose to serve its coffee hot and should have foreseen that people would burn themselves when they spilled coffee. But, here’s a question: the reason Ms. Liebeck’s injuries were so terrible was because she was wearing a sweatsuit that absorbed the hot liquid and held it close to her skin. Surely, clothing manufacturers can foresee that people will spill hot liquids on themselves. If Ms. Liebeck’s sweatpants had been made out of Gore-Tex or some other liquid-resistant material, she never would have been hurt. What’s the principle of tort law that holds McDonald’s liable, but not the clothing manufacturer?