I’ve got a new online column up at the British paper, my second. I discuss the recent lawsuit seeking to blame the social-networking site for not providing a virtual chaperone for a 14-year-old Texas user who went out on an inadvisable date. (Walter Olson, “Teens, sex, and MySpace”, Times (U.K.), Jul. 18). For earlier coverage of the MySpace suit, see Jun. 21, Jun. 23, and Jun. 26.
Posts Tagged ‘third party liability for crime’
Update: San Diego poisoning
A judge has cut from $100 million to $10 million the punitive damages portion of an unusual verdict in a lawsuit arising from Kristin Rossum’s alleged murder by poison of her husband, Gregory de Villers. The distinctive feature of the verdict, on which we commented Mar. 27, was that the jury assigned 25 percent responsibility for the murder to Rossum’s employer, San Diego County, which employed her as a toxicologist and was said to be blameworthy for letting her steal drugs which she administered to him. (“Judge Cuts $90 Million in Damages in San Diego Murder Case”, AP/L.A. Times, Jun. 19)(via Childs).
“Middle-class peeves cost more money than exists”
Via R.J. Lehmann (Mar. 27), here are some figures indicating that the sum total of the alleged costs of other people’s bad behavior may well exceed the total sum of money in existence. To be more specific: start by adding up the claimed health expenses, productivity losses and other social costs of such indulgences as alcohol ($185 billion a year, it’s said with spurious precision), overeating ($115 billion), gambling ($54 billion), and so forth. Then throw in categories such as the costs of crime, time wasted by employees visiting web sites and watching sports events, and so forth. By the time you’re done, Lehmann says, you can “come up with a grand total of $7.39 trillion – well in excess of the $6.70 trillion that actually exists” — at least if you’re willing to include a few dodgy entries in the catalog, such as taxes. (Thomas C. Greene, The Register (UK), Mar. 16).
It’s not hard to see the relevance of this line of logic to themes often dealt with in this space. In the utopia of the litigators we would succeed in charging the social costs of our overeating to the food business, the costs of our gambling to the casinos and lotteries that led us on, the costs of 9/11 to assorted banks, airlines, building owners and Saudi nabobs, the costs of street crime to deep-pocketed entities guilty of negligent security, and so on and so forth for the costs of auto accidents, pharmaceutical side effects, failure to learn in school, domestic violence, etc. It would not be surprising if the sum total of all the different injuries, insults and indignities dealt out to the human race, if monetized at the rates prescribed by advocates, handily exceeded the sum total of wealth on hand to pay, even were the whole wealth of the world placed at the courts’ disposal.
By reader acclaim: MySpace sued over alleged assault by date
On MySpace, a 19-year-old Texas youth approached a 14-year-old girl; his profile claimed that he was a high school senior on the football team. She says that following a series of emails and phone calls, she went out with him and their evening on the town culminated in his sexually assaulting her, for which Rupert Murdoch should pay $30 million as owner of the social networking site. Still to come: suits against shopping malls, ice cream shops and music venues for providing environments in which older teens can approach younger ones and sweet-talk them into eventual dangerous situations. (Claire Osborn, “Teen, mom sue MySpace.com for $30 million”, Austin American-Statesman, Jun. 20). Prof. Childs has more, here and here, as do Joanne Jacobs, KipEsquire and Shakespeare’s Sister.
Bar, bank blamed in drug shooting
On Jun. 19, 2005, police say, at the Keg of Evanston pub in suburban Chicago, Antoine Hill, then 19, shot to death Robert Gresham, 22, in a dispute over drugs. Now Gresham’s estate is suing the bar, for allegedly letting Hill inside and serving him alcohol; and a bank, as well as Hill himself. “Charles Jacques, the attorney representing Gresham’s estate, said he suspects the bank might own the building the bar is in.” Hill has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder. (“Suit filed in Evanston shooting”, Chicago Tribune, Jun. 9).
Deep pocket files: Racibozynski v. Knox College
Clyde Best was sentenced to sixty years for murdering his Knox College classmate, Andrea Racibozynski, in 1998 after a fraternity-party fight; he was identified and caught within three hours of the crime. The murder is, Racibozynski’s attorney Ed Manzke argued, the fault of the college for the way lighting in the stairwell was designed; a jury agreed, and awarded $1.05 million. (Bill Bird, “Family wins $1 mil. suit against Knox College”, Naperville Sun/Chicago Sun-Times, May 24).
County 25% responsible for employee’s murder of husband
In a sensational 2002 murder trial with echoes of the film “American Beauty”, Kristin Rossum was found guilty of poisoning husband Gregory de Villers and trying to make his death look like a suicide. Now a lawyer for de Villers’ family has convinced a jury that Rossum’s employer, San Diego County, should be held 25 percent responsible for $6 million in resulting wrongful-death damages. Rossum had access to lethal drugs through her work as a toxicologist for the county, and had not been subject to background screening; she relapsed into methamphetamine use a week before the murder. “It is not the duty of the county of San Diego to prevent a wife from murdering her husband,” said Senior Deputy County Counsel Deborah A. McCarthy, who predicted that the county would succeed in overturning the verdict on appeal. “If this case stands, it will expand public liability in a way the state of California never envisioned.” (“Millions of Dollars Awarded to Family of Man Killed by Toxicologist Wife”, North County Times, Mar. 20)(via Childs). Update Jul. 2: judge cuts verdict.
Deep pocket files: Jonathan Samuels v. Bellino Equities Boca
Jonathan Samuels employed a 52-year-old widow named Marta Pinto, who was having domestic abuse problems with her boyfriend, 79-year-old Marc Benayer. Samuels helped Pinto disengage from that relationship, which apparently upset Benayer. On a Rosh Hashana in Boca Raton, Benayer greeted Samuels at his synagogue’s services, wished him a happy new year, and asked him outside to chat; Samuels agreed, and Benayer shot Samuels twice in the back. Samuels was in intensive care for two weeks and has yet to return to work; Benayer has been charged with attempted murder. Samuels has sued Benayer (of course), but also… the owner of the shopping center that leases space to the synagogue, alleging failure to provide adequate security. (Howard Goodman, “Blaming shopping center for assault makes no sense”, Sun-Sentinel, Feb. 16).
Other Deep Pocket File entries.
FedEx Sued In Child Sex Assault Case
Paul Sykes had a criminal record when he was hired by FedEx Kinko’s; FedEx says their background check didn’t turn it up. Sykes solicited Kinko’s customers for work for his outside computer repair business; one family hired Sykes and his disturbingly-named “Facts and Fantasy” service, and Sykes went on to (allegedly) molest their eight-year-old son, a crime for which he has been arrested, charged, and has pled not guilty. The family is suing FedEx. (Bloomberg News, “FedEx Sued In Child Sex Assault Case”, Dec. 15; AP/Newsday, Dec. 14).
First WTC bombing: terrorists 32% to blame, building owners 68%
Twelve years after the event, a jury finds someone to blame for the Islamist van-bomb attack that killed six, injured nearly 1,000, and caused costly business dislocation (Sept. 21, 2005, Dec. 5, 2004, Oct. 12-14, 2001). The culprit? The Port Authority, an agency whose losses are likely to be ultimately borne by New York and New Jersey taxpayers, motorists and air travelers:
The jury voted unanimously that the Port Authority [then-owner of the WTC] was negligent. It found the authority 68 percent at fault for the bombing, while the terrorists who carried it out were 32 percent at fault.
Mr. [David J.] Dean, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that because the jury apportioned more than half the blame to the Port Authority, the agency will have to pay 100 percent of any damages for pain and suffering, the so-called non-economic damages, that might be awarded.
Regardless of how the blame was shared, the Port Authority would have to pay 100 percent of any economic damages, like lost business, he said.
Separate legal proceedings will be used to determine actual payouts; “Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they were seeking a total of as much as $1.8 billion.” And this from Mr. Dean: “The case was never about blaming the terrorists.” Well, of course it wasn’t, from his point of view, was it? (Anemona Hartocollis, “Port Authority Found Negligent in 1993 Bombing”, New York Times, Oct. 27).
So there you have it. “What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?” wrote Bertolt Brecht, and now we learn that being the target of a terrorist act carries with it more than twice as much responsibility for the resulting damage as actually planting and detonating the bomb. The jury’s (and plaintiff’s lawyer’s) rationale was that security experts had warned that the use of car bombs was on the rise, and yet the PA did not take the (massively disruptive to its tenants) step of closing its enormous underground garage to the public. Inevitably, the lawyers portrayed the earlier advice as a “smoking gun”, a strategem I describe in Chapter 6 of The Litigation Explosion:
Among the favorite smoking-gun generators are memo debates or unheeded suggestions within an organization. The sought-after memo will advise the hotel to dismantle the diving board, the brokerage to go easy on the risky investment, the magazine to kill the hard-hitting investigative story, the hospital to close down the vaccination program that has attracted malpractice suits. (They knew it was wrong to go ahead!) New York City injury king Harry Lipsig’s law firm got a $1.8 million settlement for forty-six-year-old postal worker Freddie Brown, mugged and badly hurt in a housing project lobby, after they found a security specialist whose recommendations to upgrade security at the project had gone unheeded. “We couldn’t lose,” jubilated lawyer Thomas Stickel. “With that witness, we had the city by the throat.” Actually, it would be a wonder if the files of a city as intensively governed as New York did not contain unheeded recommendations by the bushelful on countless subjects.
The logic of lawyers’ search for “smoking guns” is that an organization faces one of three unattractive choices: put itself at risk for verdicts like this; implement any and all recommendations it gets from security experts, no matter that many of them will be costly and intrusive (like, say, stadium patdowns for football fans) and will guard against dangers that never would have materialized; or alternatively, arrange its affairs so that fewer safety recommendations enter its files in the first place, either by asking its experts to commit fewer ideas to paper, or just by not employing them. The New York Sun quotes me today in its coverage of the story: David Lombino, “Port Authority Is Held Liable in Bombing That Killed Six in 1993 Attack on WTC”, New York Sun, Oct. 27. More:Ann Althouse and commenters discuss the verdict, while Michael Krauss at Point of Law hopes it will be thrown out on grounds of lack of proximate cause.