Point the Finger In the Right Direction
It is probably a horrible experience to be a victim of a senseless bombing, as in the one happened in the 1996 Olympics. However, awarding the victims who had a lawsuit against the Olympic Planning Committee is ridiculous!!!!
That's like saying if I get robbed on the street, I'm suing the city for inadequate protection, or suing the city of Oklahoma for the McVeigh bombing because of poor security measures, or if I was hurt on the 9/11 attack that I should sue the government for inadequate anti-terrorist programs in place.
There is a big difference between negligence and uncontrollable actions.
Were all these aforementioned events horrible? Yes, definitely so.
Do I wish they never happened? Of course.
Do I wish no one got hurt or killed? Absolutely.
But to try and find and blame on those who took the appropriate and acceptable precautions at the present time is wrong. Hold the ones truly accountable for the actions liable, not the ones who try to prevent them.
Awarding or settling lawsuits such as these opens up a door that I don't think we want opened.
Comments
I hate to break it to you , brother, but that door you’re talking about has already been “opened,” if you will. There was compensation for both the Oklahoma and 9/11 victims / survivors. If you will recall, it seemed that the biggest concern for the airlines was not how to make their planes safer but how to prevent a massive law suit from the victims' survivors. They even sought Congressional aid so that they would be immune from any such lawsuits.
Not to get too “lawyerly” or what have you, but in determining negligence liability the law looks at certain factors. Specifically, there must be a duty, that duty was breached, the breach of such duty actually and proximately caused the injury, and damages. In the case of a mugging, the City (and by extension police officers) do owe a duty to citizens but governmental entities enjoy something called “governmental immunity” which insulates them from civil claims from things like mugging. Even outside of that, by having a sufficient number of police officers a city could probably show that it met its duty to keep its citizens safe. Furthermore, the citizen might have a difficult time showing “causation.” The victim would have to show that it was because the city breached a duty owned to the victim that the citizen was mugged.
With regard to the Atlanta bombing settlement, it’s possible that the Olympic committee could have won in court but they probably did a cost analysis and decided that it would cost them less both monetarily and in terms of publicity to settle than to go to court.
I’m not sure where I stand on “tort reform.” (Negligence actions fall within the ambit of tort law). Generally speaking, plaintiffs’ attorneys think that when someone is hurt then probably someone breached a duty and there must be some form of compensation either to make the victim whole or to punish the wrongdoer to prevent the same harm from occurring in the future. Your feelings go to the heart of the current hot legal debate over Med-Mal reform and whether damages should be capped or limited to just compensatory damages and no punitive damages.
I could go on and on about this but this is already pretty long for a “comment.” ;-)
Posted by: Nic | April 27, 2005 07:17 PM