A robber enters a bank and demands the money. The teller refuses to give the 5000$ on hand in the branch. The robber takes a hostage and threatens to kill the hostage if he doesn’t get the money. The teller still refuses. The robber kills the hostage and, realizing the robbery has gone on too long, leaves.
The robber is not found by the police. The family of the hostage sues the bank and the bank teller for not having given the money when the robber threatened to kill the hostage.
Should the bank and/or the teller be found civilly liable and have to pay damages?
NOTE:
I should mention that I am not asking what you think the relevant law is but rather what the relevant law should be.
First off, that teller is going to be fired. When I was a bank CSR, we were specifically and in no uncertain terms instructed to cooperate with people with guns, and I can’t imagine that the tellers were given any different instructions. This is common in banks – probably universal. The teller should have handed the money over long before the hostage was taken.
In the second place, while I am not a lawyer, I imagine the bank would have a defense in that the teller willfully disregarded his or her training and bank policy in arguing with the robber. So assuming the bank has the usual rules, I imagine they’d bring that up at trial, or even before. The teller’s managers and coworkers, along with the training department, will all be asked to testify that the teller broke the bank’s rules as well as common sense in the incident. I know know what the average juror would think, but I certainly would not hold the bank liable here unless the teller has earlier indicated that she or he would refuse to cooperate with the robber and was allowed to keep his or her job.
ETA: I’d be interested in hearing the rationalization of any who wish to hold the bank liable but not the teller.
I don’t know what the relevant law is. But assuming the hypothetical bank has the policies and training in place as the banks I worked at, I can’t see holding them liable for an employee stupidly and arrogantly breaking those rules. (Again, at my banks, doing what the teller does in your hypo was a firing offense, whether or not any hostage got killed.) As I am not a lawyer, I will not comment on how agency and whatnot affect the bank’s liability here.
So, unless the bank has a policy of not cooperating with robbers, it should not be held liabble.
It wasn’t aimed at you so much as your post made me realize that my OP could easily be misunderstood as asking what the relevant law is rather than what it should be.
If the bank did have a policy of not cooperating with bank robbers, it should be liable in this situation?
At common law, if someone who is an employee, does not follow instruction, that generally does not relieve the employer of liability. This occurred in the line of his work. It was not something outside of it.
In this case, I really do not see a claim succeeding against either the bank or the teller. Nor should it.
If the teller were being asked to, I dunno, submit to abuse or robbery himself, then I’d say he had no obligation to do so. But that’s not the case here. The teller is being asked to give over someone else’s money. As I wrote in my initial post, the banks I worked out both required tellers and CSRs to cooperate with robbers (as well as to take measures to minimize our exposure to them, such as following proper cash handling procedures, not keeping more than a set amount in the till, making sure the doors were lcked at appropriate times, not trying to enter the bank in the morning if a strange car were unaccountably idling near the door, and so on). These rules exists to minimize the danger to the bank, its employees, and its customers, and they are reasoanble. Armed robbers almost always win in the short term and almost always lose in the long because of rules like these, and that works for me.
Unless the tellers are Superman or Jean Grey, they need to stop tryin gto be a hero and fork over the money for their own safety.
That may be logical, and make sense from a financial standpoint, but that doesn’t seem to make any sense legally. The person robbing the bank is the one responsible for his own actions, no one else.
I want to echo the last two posters. The robber is responsible for his own actions; no one else is. Regardless of the bank’s policies, they’re not holding a gun on the hostage – even a metaphorical one. Whether the teller think they’re calling the robber’s bluff, or wants to me a hero, or is just sick of being a push over, it doesn’t matter – they’re not the one pulling the trigger.
The person committing the crime is the one responsible for it. Jean Valjean may have had good reason for stealing the loaf of bread, but he’s still a thief.
The OP was about civil liability, not criminal. Of course the robber is the only one going to jail here. But the teller and the bank created a very unsafe environment, and quite unnecessarily. They’re both liable (though I can see Skald’s argument that if the bank had very explicit policies and training that the teller ignored, that should mitigate their responsibility.)
I think I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not seeing any shades of responsibility where people are somewhat at fault but not completely. The only person who created an unsafe situation was the person who brought the gun.
I don’t think it’s that simple. What if the teller had said “Fuck you, robber. You’re such a fucking pussy that I doubt you have the balls to shoot him”? The teller has a responsibility to defuse the situation and has received specific training in how to do so. For him to willfully ignore that training seems negligent.
To what degree does a bank or a teller have a duty of care to the clients of that bank while the client’s are in the bank making transactions?
My best guess (and it is just a guess), is that a bank would have a duty of care with regard to immediate and forseeable harm.
If there is such a duty of care, what is the standard that the bank or teller should meet?
I have no idea what the law is on such things, but would guess that the standard would be at least to act in a reasonable manner when it was immediately forseeable that failing to do so would get the client to whom the bank owed a duty of care shot.
I expect that whether or not the bank would have to cover the damage caused by its employee would have a lot to do with whether the employee was acting in his or her normal capacity by following the bank’s procedure, or was going cowboy against the bank’s procedure.
Once that unsafe situation was created, it is the responsibility of the bank and employees to mitigate the effects of that situation on their customers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a psycho with a gun, a wandering grizzly bear or an electrical fire. You have invited people into your privately owned building for commerce purposes, you have a responsibility to provide a reasonable level of care while they are on your property.
I suspect the bank will settle a wrongful death action on these facts, eventually. Really don’t see them wanting to go to trial and let a jury hear about how their employee ignored demands that may have saved the customer’s life. The bank has insurance, so they’ll likely be willing to pay something to make it go away.
