Life imitates legal cliche: injury plaintiff winds up owning amusement park is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

February 5 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

N.Y.: “Senator Alesi Sues Couple that Declined to Press Charges Against Him” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Chutzpah hits the rails” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Zapped Amtrak trespasser sues” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

This is, alleges an Orange County, New York, suit filed by Lindsey’s parents, the fault of the school district and the city of Port Jervis, New York. After all, the district was “irresponsible” stacking milk crates by the school. A curious choice of words: out of the number of people irresponsible here, it seems to me that the district is at most a distant eighth. (Steve Sacco, “Parents suing Port Jervis, school in girl’s fatal fall through roof”, Times Herald-Record, Jul. 26; Adam Bosch, “1 teen dead, 1 critical in fall”, Times Herald-Record, Jan. 27). The attorney is Corey Stark, a 2001 law-school graduate in New York City who has single-handedly refuted the proposition that New York state needs more law schools. (Thought experiment: if the milk crates are an attractive nuisance, why isn’t the dairy liable?)

Suit: your milkcrates were an attractive nuisance is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Roller-coaster enthusiast and torts professor Bill Childs is stealing our thunder in his coverage of the recent Georgia Batman roller coaster decapitation of Asia LeeShawn Ferguson IV, so there’s no point in rewriting his excellent post instead of quoting it:

The family of the young man killed at Six Flags Over Georgia had said pretty emphatically that they weren’t blaming the park (here (“All we know is that we don’t blame anybody.”). But, well, now they’ve got a lawyer:

“Attorney Lamar Flatt thinks warning signs and fences placed near the ride weren’t enough to prevent this tragic death …”

Just as a reminder, there was at least one (and reports indicate two) six-foot fence, clear signs, and, let’s not forget, a multi-ton very loud steel roller coaster all rather prominent in the area. (The manufacturer of the ride, B&M, makes coasters that are sufficiently loud that the phrase “B&M roar” came into existence.) …

But it’s hard to see what more could be expected. Razor wire? A shark-infested moat with sharks with lasers?

Well, Bill, as 11Alive reports:

The Labor Department recommended that security officers should be stationed in the area of the ride until increased signage and fencing could be put in place. The existing signage, the Labor Department found, does meat [sic] state and national standards established by the American Society for Testing and Materials. However, the Labor Department suggested the number and size of the signs should be increased; additionally, it was suggested the signs should include the words “Extreme Danger.”

Presumably, thanks to overwarning, everyone knows to ignore the signs that simply say “Danger.” Thus signs need to be New-and-improved EXTREME Danger-with-an-exclamation-point! I’m just waiting for someone to point out that to the kids of today Extreme means “cool” and increases the attractive nuisance. (Related NSFW Youtube satire on “extreme” relating to the Warner Brothers efforts to Poochie-ize Bugs Bunny by making him more “extreme.” Funny, if tiresome after 80 seconds if not before.)

Sadly, a cynical commenter was correct. Childs has a funny roller-coaster warning sign from a different amusement park, too. Click over there so he isn’t too mad that we’ve quoted so many of the good parts of his post.

“Please Disregard That ‘We’re Not Blaming the Park’ Thing” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Now, Hawaii is considering legislation similar to California’s that would give immunity to property-owners sued by people injured in the course of committing particular felonies, though it’s not clear to me that it would apply to unarmed burglary, which seems to only be a “Class C” felony in Hawaii.

Six months ago on Overlawyered… is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Trespassers and skylights, UK edition is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Except if one actually goes to the document, buried within a lot of rhetoric criticizing reformers for mentioning the Bodine lawsuit, we learn: Ricky Bodine was a 19-year-old high-school graduate who, with three other friends (one of whom had a criminal record), decided the night of March 1, 1982, to steal a floodlight from the roof of the Enterprise High School gymnasium. Ricky climbed the roof, removed the floodlight, lowered it to the ground to his friends, and, as he was walking across the roof (perhaps to steal a second floodlight), he fell through the skylight. Bodine suffered terrible injuries to be sure, though one questions the relevance: if the school is legally responsible for burglars’ safety, it doesn’t matter whether Bodine stubbed a toe or, as actually happened, became a spastic quadriplegic. But I fail to see what it is that reformers are supposedly misrepresenting. A burglar fell through a skylight, and sued the owner of the skylight for his injuries. Bodine sued for $8 million (in 1984 dollars, about $16 million today) and settled for the nuisance sum of $260,000 plus $1200/month for life, about the equivalent of a million dollars in conservatively-estimated 2006 present value.

In other words, a burglar fell through a skylight, and blamed the skylight’s owners for his injuries; because the law permits such suits, and because the law does not compensate defendants for successful defenses, Bodine had the ability to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers for injuries suffered in the course of his own criminal behavior. Bodine’s only hope of recovery is the law’s rejection of proximate cause as prerequisite to liability. Assemblyman Alister McAlister, the Democratic legislator who used the story to push for reform, described the facts correctly. McAllister didn’t mention that Bodine was 19, but so what? He didn’t mention that Bodine was 6’1″ and a waiter, either, and all three facts are irrelevant. Lilliedoll accuses McAlister of falsely claiming that the legal theory was “failure to warn,” but that’s hardly an inaccurate description of a duty-to-trespassers theory: the alleged duty could have been fulfilled by posting visible warnings to trespassers of the dangers of traversing the roof.

Were the skylights safe? Perhaps not; there had been other accidents (all involving trespassers) at other schools, though not long enough before Bodine’s accident for a school bureaucracy to have time to react. But, for most people’s sense of justice, that is hardly relevant: Bodine had no business being on the roof in the first place. In the words of anti-reformer Justinian Lane, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

If this is the best the anti-reformers can do to point out “distortions” in the reform movement, I’d say we’re doing a pretty good job. (Earlier in the series: Sep. 17; Sep. 18). And once again, the only people misrepresenting anything are the supporters of the litigation lobby, who once again fail to honestly engage with the reform position in their efforts to rebut it.

Update: David Nieporent notes in the comments:

Ted, you missed the best part of the skylight anecdote. In another post on Tortdeform, Cyrus Dugger approvingly cites a long passage from a book review of an anti-tort reform book. That passage also attempts to debunk the skylight story. But here’s how it describes it:

The actual case involved a teenager who was on the roof of a school and, by the best accounts we can find, was trying to redirect a light because they were trying to play basketball. And while he was on the roof he stepped through the skylight, which had been painted over black. So this may have been a trespasser, but it wasn’t a burglar. (Emphasis added.)

That’s right: in this account which is trying to debunk myths about the case, cited approvingly by Tortdeform, it turns a thief into a guy “trying to redirect a light.”

The burglar and the skylight: another debunking that isn’t is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system