Since the dead child was riding a bicycle without wearing a helmet, the speeder who killed him is suing the parents for $15K, claiming contriubtory negligence and pain and suffering.
It’s a pro se lawsuit for God’s sake. By a prisoner. This is far from the most stupid one filed that day, let alone ever.
Meh, guy’s a douche. Ain’t no law ‘gainst bein’ a douche.
But there’s no law against pitting a douche, either.
This reminds me of a case on Judge Judy. The teenaged daughters of both the plaintiff and defendant got into a car crash in the plaintiff’s car. The defendant’s daughter was killed. The plaintiff was suing for damages to the car.
I grieve for the parents. I do. But I was bothered by the mother’s quote in the story. “Prisoners have too many rights”? And, frankly, the fact that they sued an indigent prisoner for $15,000 seems a little clueless, like poking a snake with a stick. What were they expecting to get, his cigarettes?
That’s the part of it that was most confusing to me. If they were suing, I’d assume they’d go for a lot more than $15,000 in a death by a drunk driver case, whether he could pay it or not.
The low amount makes me think it might well be the parents’ insurance company that sued him presuming he was driving without insurance (or the insurance didn’t pay because he was drunk).
My God, can you imagine if there were? A law against being a douche, and stupid being painful - this would change EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING, I SAY!
I’m no lawyer, but the countersuit that the prisoner is bringing against the boy’s family sounds like a suit to make the original suit go away.
My guess is more, Cat Whisperer, it’s a suit because the prisoner is bored as hell and wanted something to do.
Would the prisoner have come up with the idea of a countersuit on his own, or would his lawyer have suggested it, do you figure?
If it’s pro se, he doesn’t have a lawyer.
People have a lot of time on their hands in prison, and file a lot of baseless law suits. It’s free, and sitting in the library writing a law suit beats being sodomized in the showers, I would imagine.
I don’t know. If I were being sued by the murderer of my child for negligence, I probably wouldn’t be overly sympathetic about the rights of prisoners either.
Having said that, I can only hope that this guy drops the soap in the shower.
Assuming he was insured, his insurer would be the one paying, not him. The $15,000 figure says “policy limit claim” to me. Any judgment over that amount would be assessed against him directly, but if he’s got no money there’s no point making a claim over the policy limit.
Probably a counterclaim, not a countersuit. That means the same judge and jury would hear it, during the same trial.
That said, contributory negligence is a defense, not a claim, so probably the article has it totally wrong and that’s just one of his defenses.
Insurance companies typically require their clients to attempt to obtain damages from the actual perpetrators of damage before turning to the insurance company to pay. The suit might have been filed without much hope of collecting in order to establish due diligence in that regard. For that matter, the insurance company might have initiated the suit as SOP.
It’s also possible that the family of the deceased isn’t entirely convinced that the perpetrator is indigent, and want to have a claim on any assets that turn up.
If he were insured, wouldn’t his insurance company be defending against the claim? And both suits are for “more than $15,000,” which makes the policy limit theory a bit less likely, as does the remoteness of the possibility that his insurance company (if he has one) would deny the claim, making the parents’ lawsuit necessary in the first place, as does also the likelihood that with his history of drunken driving, he may have been uninsurable.
My theory stands: yes, the prisoner’s lawsuit is fueled by boredom and ignorance, but its main motivation is that he’s pissed off about being sued in the first place, and given the history of prison lawsuits, suing him was ill-considered in the first place.
However, there is the possibility that they only sued because their insurance company required them to make an effort to collect from him before they would pay out.
I was hit by a drunk driver with no insurance. My insurance company sued him while he was in prison to recover the cost of their payments to me. I would think it highly likely that is the situation here. By accepting the payments from the insurance company for P&S ($500 I seem to recall) I waived my own right to sue the drunk assclown.
What? You can file a lawsuit whether or not they deny your claim. If it’s denied, you seek benefits; if it isn’t, you seek more benefits (or a settlement).
I think an anonymous comment on the linked story pretty much nails the whole thing on the head: