I understand it had something to do with an accident involving a freak…
My husband and I were told we had a case against a doctor after my husband’s heart attack at age 33, and we were a little tempted. Of course, because he survived, we knew what the negligence was “worth” because we know how much we’ve had to pay in medical bills.
The situation you describe, Lissa, is very sad, but I think the parents are probably behaving badly. I might sue for the removal of the item that caused the death, based on the idea that if you use an item correctly, it shouldn’t cause death–and any item that can is too unpredictable for use by a child. But money doesn’t bring the child back, and only punishes people who apparently did nothing wrong.
Julie
Boy, is this thread illustrative. Look at the responses for sense of what happens in a jury rooms.
“If you investigate hard enough, you will find some individual(s) who directly allowed the dangerous situation…”
“The world and everything in it.”
“They wish to ‘punish’ the nursing home.”
The reality occassionally is that bad uncaring people are negligent and that awful things result. Not too often. Most people really do want to do a good job at what they do. Really. More often the reality is that good caring people make one wrong decision out of a hundred or get sloppy one day and something bad happens that time, or that something bad happens just because sometimes they do. Good people make mistakes and even if everything is done correctly bad things can happen.
What if there had been a maintainance guy who missed tightening one of the bolts and that bolt had loosened and caused the accident? A normal Joe who just got distracted and skipped something that he normally does. A mistake. That allowed the dangerous situation to happen. That caused the loss of life that is worth the world and everything in it.
Few people are as wise as XT: “I can understand the pull for a parent. For myself, if I HAD of gone through with it, it would have been purely for revenge. But, there is no revenge. … and NO amount of money was equal to my little girl.”
Many instead believe that someone who made a mistake must be a bad person and that they need to be punished. And that they want that punishment to be as close to the world and everything in it as they can get.
In the world of the PI Plaintiff’s bar, there is no such thing as an accident. If something undesirable happens, someone has to be to blame, and that someone does not include the injured party.
In another thread I wrote this:
"Another thing that I find worrying about this thread is how many posts there are that go into the whole legaleze around this whole incident. A lot of the posts go on about which law applies, and who should sue who. No wonder the American legal system is drowning in frivolous lawsuits. Does everything have to be resolved by a court of law, instead of just plain old common sense?
A lot of these trends in American society (along with the dumbing down of a large part of the population) have me really worried about the long term future of a country I love very much."
and damned if it doesn’t apply here as well. I simply fail to understand the American fascination with litigation and damages. Instead of talking about the tragedy of losing a child, how much a child’s life means to the parents, and how to deal with losing a child (with the exception of xtisme and a few others), the posts discuss whether the family should have accepted the money, whether they should sue, how much they can expect, etc.
And Dinsdale’s post just makes me sad at how little humanity some people have left. I know very few lawyers are like that, and I know there are evil people in other professions also, but instead of always trying to place blame and gaining as much out of it as possible, I think Americans should start focusing more on what is wrong with that whole mindset.
Why can’t people think and act more like Triss or xtisme?
The posts are about money because that’s what the OP is asking.
Julie
The loss of a child is a tragedy. No doubt about it. Many children die every day but parents accept the loss and carry on. It is all a matter of perspective. There is no guarantee that the child would grow up to be someone famous, rich, powerful, etc. OR a degenerate useless member of society. Each one has a potential to ge either way or to be an ordinary member of society.
Union carbide was sued for their pants in India over a freak accident at a pesticide plant. The “ambulance chasers” had a filed day filing claims for millions of dollars for their clients who would never have earned a small fraction of that sum in several lifetimes. Who enriched themselves but the greedy lawyers?
Who paid the bills? Union Carbide? The stock holders of course AND the public in geneeral, although indirectly. The specific product is no longer made, the prices of other products increased to pay the bill!
Pain and suffering is a vague catchall diecription for feeling bad over the loss.
Those of us who have a strong faith in a better afterlife can take such losses in stride, feeling the loss by confident the deceased is in far better circumstances than here in the uncertain present
Find someone ELSE to blame for whatever is wrong!
What a way to live, can’t even live with yourself.
What do snakes, snails and puppy-dog tails go for per pound?
Did you read the OP? This is a debate about:
If you want to have a debate about the tragedy of losing a child, go and start a thread about it. No one here is diputing that the parents have suffered a horrible loss. The narrow focus of the conversation is whether or not an offer of $500K was too much, or too little.
So the city (and their insurers) subrogate against the equipment manufacturer, the seller, the installers, maintenance providers, suppliers of constituent parts, etc. Like I said, something unfortunate happened, so somebody’s gonna have to pay. It’s the American way!
BTW - what WAS this thing and what did it DO?
So you want a price tag on human life.
The intrinisic worth of the human body at best is a few dollars at most for the market value of the chemical constituents.
The liffeforce/spirit/soul is of inestimatable value. No amount of money can replace it.
Matthew 16:26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Mark 8:37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
I used to clerk at a law firm that represented a large auto manufacturer. When adults die, the majority of the bickering is in regards to income line, life expectancy, social involvement, etc.(These things almost always get settled out of court) But kids were handled differently, since no income line can be established, etc. etc. etc. Original offers and counter offers on both sides usually begin on very opposite ends of the spectrum. Ultimately, depending on the case, they are settled for an amount that is generally lower than what an adult would have garnered. But in cases of particular negligence, the gloves came off, and no limit was set.
Ultimately the answer to How Much is a Little Boy Worth?
is: How much do we think the Jury will award.
Sad but true.
I’d rather not give any more details of the case. I’m a bit paranoid about divulging my location over the internet.
**NurseCarmen ** is right about the offers going back and forth. It was in this evening’s paper that the city has asked the family to hold off on their suit until the city can make a new offer.
**
I’ve known some deeply religious people in my time, but I’ve never known one who could take the death of a child “in stride.”
Am I the only one who thinks the parents are in the wrong in this case? A normally safe piece of playground equpiment suddenly goes odd and kills a child. After a year of investigation, there is no one to find at fault, it was just something that happens. The city offers, in goodwill, $500000. The parents say, “That’s insulting”, and are now attempting to countersue for even more money. I mean, I dunno, if the child had been struck by lightning while playing in the playground, who would they try to sue then? It’s not that I don’t feel for the parents, but I think they should have either taken the $500000, or refused it and left it at that.
No. If you read what has been written you will see that a number of posters, in fact the majority, seem to be of the belief that the parents are not entitled to anything, and certainly not more than $500K.
If only the city had put up a sign informing the poor child that it is dangerous to play outside in an electrical storm. If the cheap city had spent $10 on such a sign, this horrible tragedy would have been averted.
And, depending on exactly how much handholding you deem necessary, add in a lightning detector-siren system, and maybe even police or other personnel to escort park patrons to safety when it rains.
Unreasonable you say? I ask you what the cost would have been, compared to the loss of this sweet child’s life.
A $10 sign wouldn’t do it. Such a cheap sign might blow over, and whack someone in the head, leading to another lawsuit.
But herein lies the serious answer to the question as rhetorically in the op.
What if all that would, on average, prevent one child’s death per $100 mill spent. Would society do it? For 50 mill/child’s life saved? For 1 mill per child’s life saved?
How much are willing to spend, to raise your taxes to do it, to take away from education or defense or whathaveyou, per child save a child’s life?
Don’t say that life is priceless unless you are willing to give up all of the education and defense budget and raise your taxes to boot to do it. Give me a number. Play the game.
It all depends on where you stand.
If you’re the parent, your child is worth the world.
If you’re close to the child, a million.
If you’re reading about it on a message board, from “some significant amount” to “none”, perhaps.
If it’s a child dying of starvation in the Sudan or Indian, apparently not even $1 a month, according to what the commercials tell us.
I think that if the city is offering a settlement, and engineers can truly find no foreseeable reason that a danger was or should have been known, then they should take the settlement as-offered. The money could be useful for many things - such as the education of his siblings, support of the family, a scholarship fund, a memorial, maybe even an education campaign to prevent further accidents of that sort. IMO.
Salaam aleikulm Xtisme. May I offer you my sympathy and wish you and your family all the strenght you need in living with your loss.
How true.
We have lost 3 children and no one to blame but “nature”, who constructed them to fragile to survive.
It brought us mentally in hell.
But it is true that religion can play - and in our case it does play - a great role in accepting and dealing with the loss.
I hope you find your own way.
As for the question in the OP, it is answered by the poster who said: “The whole world and everything in it isn’t enough to compete with the irreplacable life of your child.”
And on the question if the parents mentioned in the OP are wrong in their case…
Taking in account the limited information to judge on, it would seem to me that they are extremely in the wrong here.
It seems that nothing can be blamed but the coincidence that made the accident happen.
Reeding the remarks M.Holmes, I must agree that the perception we have of the US legal system is that it offers people a lot of opportunities to sue for the sake of the argument with the only goal of making excessive profit.
There are a lot of cases that wouldn’t even be accepted as such in other countries.
Salaam. A