Having a brittle skull is not a condition within the control of an injured person. Wearing a helmet is. That’s why not wearing a helmet is an affirmative defense here.
And, you’ll note, the point isn’t that the kid necessarily **had **any culpability for the accident: “The question is who is responsible, and how much? 50/50? 80/20? 99/1? 100/0? A jury will decide.” Because that’s how the justice system works in this country.
Not everywhere. What you are talking about is comparative negligence. While this is rule for most of the country, there are still a few states that haven’t adopted it.
Under the states that use contributory negligence, as long as the Defendant can show that the plaintiff was even 1% at fault, the plaintiff will be barred from recovering. However, I don’t believe that Connecticut is one of those states.
It’s not.
Sorry, ambiguous phrasing on my part. When I said “this is how it works,” I meant it much more broadly, in the general sense of “people are allowed to bring suits, responses to suits, counterclaims, etc., and then it’s decided whether or not the claims have any merit, so stop getting your fucking panties in a wad because somebody is making a claim you find ridiculous.” I wasn’t attempting to comment on the particular kind of suit, which I know SFA about.
Well, that’s fair enough, but I think you’ll find most people would rather it didn’t get that far. Jury trials are expensive affairs even if you win, and the time the parents’ attorney(s) will spend getting the counterclaim dismissed will cost them.
I don’t think that’s the legal end of the story. We had a story here a couple of weeks ago where two teenaged sisters got drunk and walked home down the middle of a very busy street, and one ended up getting killed by a car. I don’t see where you can completely blame the car driver for hitting a drunk person walking down the middle of a road. There were extenuating circumstances in that the streetlights for this stretch of road were out, but it wasn’t so dark that they couldn’t tell when they were off the road or in the middle of it.
Extrapolating from this story to the one in this thread, if the kid was injured in such a way that a helmet would have kept him alive, can you completely blame the driver, or does the kid get some blame for not protecting himself while engaging in a dangerous activity?
Want to negotiate the terms for the bet, Clothahump?
The article says that they parents are suing for “at least” $15,000 in damages. That sounds jurisdictional to me.
For the non-lawyers, different courts hear different cases, depending on the amount at issue. In California, we have small claims, limited civil, and unlimited civil. The procedural rules are different in each, and basically are intended to streamline the process if there’s less at issue. So in small claims, for example, you can sue for up to $7500 (or something like that), but you can’t have a lawyer, and you can’t do discovery. In unlimited civil, you can seek more than $25,000, and discovery is wide open. In limited civil, you’re seeking an amount greater than that available in small claims, but less than that available in unlimited civil, and the discovery procedures that exist are greater than those available in small claims but fewer than those available in unlimited civil.
So the “at least $15,000 in damages” sounds like a jurisdictional thing, that the parents are simply asserting their right to be in the court that they’re in.
A couple of points, although I know absolutely nothing about Connecticut pleading procedures. First, in California at least, you do have to pay to file an answer to a lawsuit filed against you, and it wouldn’t surprise me that a state like Connecticut would also require a fee. $500 seems way high to me, but that could be the fee to file an answer and a counterclaim (or as we would call it, a cross complaint).
Second, without knowing anything about Connecticut, it may be that one can file a counterclaim in the same document as the answer, thus engendering the confusion.
But I agree with villa; prisoners are bored, if they have an active case pending they get time in the law library, and the prisoners I have known basically sue everyone they come into contact with. The California Attorney General’s office, responsible for responding to prisoner lawsuits, assigns an ungodly number of lawyers to deal with all that muck. So leaving aside the questionable legal merits of the claim, there’s the more practical reason that the guy has nothing better to do with his time.
That makes sense. Good catch. Not practicing in state courts makes me forget that stuff.
I think California is, if not alone, then certainly rare in that regard. I’m pretty sure most states’ civil claims are simply split into “small” and “everything else”.
A cross-complaint, at least in the Federal rules and Florida, would be a claim by a defendant against another defendant, so I guess that’s another difference.
In Virginia you must bring a claim in a particular court depending on the level of claim - and it isn’t just small claims court and the rest.
Well, California is in many ways very unlike other states. The law here is mainly statutory, the procedure is a bit funky sometimes, and we’ve got lots of courts. I understand that the Los Angeles County Superior Court is the largest court in the US, and the LA District Attorney is the largest local prosecutorial agency in the US. So there are some procedures developed in California that I think are intended to address the immense size of LA.
But we like it. 
While I think Weaving is probably a wanker and full of shit, its not hard to imagine circumstances that would mitigate his guilt.
It does seem undisputed that he was doing 80, that (to me anyway) has different implications if the limit on the road in question was 35 as opposed (for the sake of argument) to 70 or 75.
Where was the kid riding the bike? Hard shoulder, extreme right lane, third lane. What sort of road was it? A freeway is different to a residential street.
Now the fact that he got 10 years tells me that what he did was pretty egregarious, but as a general principle, it doesn’t seem “wrong” to hold somebody to a reasonable level of care for their own safety - even if someone else is doing something illegal.
State Route 69 in Prospect, CT, is two-lane rural blacktop with a hard shoulder and a speed limit of 45 MPH. There are many homes with driveways opening directly onto it.
Connecticut has no limited division in their superior court; there does not appear to be any fee for an answer to a complaint, but there is a fee for initiation of complex litigation, which might arise from a counterclaim (lawyers?), and there are fees for some motions.
Weaving’s suit is not yet on the CT court website, but the Kenneys’ suit is, and a sad chronicle it is – sad both in terms of the reporting practices, and in terms of the case. The Kenneys sued Weaving and the commissioner of the local motor vehicle department in March of 2009; the suit against the commissioner has been dismissed, there are interrogatories, discoveries, motions, and objections flying back and forth, and at some point, Weaving filed for a protective order (?!) – somewhere in the midst of this, his lawyer withdrew or was fired, and Weaving, on his own, sued the prison warden and a neighbor of the Kenneys (for what, I don’t know).
Does a protective order mean what I think it means–something to keep the family from coming near him? If the guy needs one of those in jail–that makes me think the guy may really be a victim of some sort.
No, that’s usually called a restraining order, though not always; a protective order, in litigation, “prevents the disclosure of sensitive information except to certain individuals under certain conditions.”
Weaving is probably trying to quash discovery motions or interrogatories; whether to protect his privacy or just waste time is uncertain.
Stories like this are the reason I favor the death penalty for everything.
This isn’t a word. But it damn well ought to be.
I think that you are right. I’ve seen the term used in trying to cut off certain types of discovery in litigation.