Actually, if she does have a stranger phobia or whatever, and they did know, and they still provoked it, it was indeed a malicious act.
Look, I’m not saying Ms. Young was in the right here (see my first post where I VERY CLEARLY STATED THAT); I’m just saying that there is obviously more going on here than meets the eye. I do not believe that a court would find in favour of someone with no better defense than “I don’t like those girls and their cookies.”
I’m with you Cheesesteak. I live quite far out in the sticks, If someone knocked on my door (no doorbell) at 10:30. And then left, I’d be concerned. .
There would be only two reasons that would come to my mind for someone to knock that late. Someone is looking for help, or someone is looking for trouble. I would assume it is someone in need of help, but would be very cautious. People just don’t randomly show up at my house.
I would, however open the door, find the cookies and figure it out. It would be weird.
And 10:30 is way to late to be doing this.
I just want to offer another commendation to Bricker for his offer. You’ve got class, Rick. 
I got an “Out of Office Auto-Reply” from the Denver Post e-mail address of the article’s author:
I will be happy to pass on the e-mail address that was provided above to interested parties; I have sent mail to it repeating my offer of contributions.
I’ll keep the thread updated.
No, certainly not. However, the article states that the victim phoned the sheriff’s department and that “Deputies determined that no crime had been committed.” The judge also did not award punitive damages, or allow her claim for “pain and suffering.” All the girls ended up having to pay were the actual medical expenses that they had offered to pay originally, and I suspect that the only reason the judge allowed for that, was because they stated a willingness to have done so in the first place.
Cheesesteak, I don’t disagree that, while meaning well, the girls made some errors in judgment that night, by not responding and identifying themselves when asked. But they did apologize and they did offer to compensate the woman. Your contention that she refused because she thought she might suffer further damages is belied by the fact that her stated reason for not signing it was that she didn’t think their apologies were sincere enough for her because they weren’t made in person, and that she hoped she taught them a lesson. That’s really what this whole suit was about – “teaching them a lesson.” I suspect the woman has learned a lesson or two, herself.
Well, I cribbed it from Cardozo or Learned Hand or Mansfield or somebody.
However, Cheesesteak, that is not the law. Assuming the P. sued on a negligence theory here, the harm had to come from the girls behaving inappropriately carelessly. You’re never going to convince me that that happened. CandidG’s got the right of it – on your theory, anyone who had a rational fear of cheesesteaks could sue the pants off you. But you’ve done nothing careless, because you’ve done nothing that would likely cause harm to someone without special vulnerabilities. Under the law as it stands, you can’t be sued, even if the word cheesesteak sends some lurker into a coma. If a victim of an alleged tort is injured only because of her special vulnerabilities, there is no cause for recovery.
–Cliffy
P.S. KellyM: Yeah, I’m assuming negligence was the CoA. There appears to be no showing of intent for IIED and without some special circumstance tresspass probably doesn’t/shouldn’t apply to walking up to a doorway.
Some people go to bed early. Some people have young kids that go to bed early. Some people don’t want to be bothered in the evening. 10:30 pm might sound early enough, but a lot of parents and elderly individuals don’t think so.
Personally, I wouldn’t appreciate someone coming up to my house and knocking on the door at 10:30 pm, running off and leaving cookies. Why?
-The dog would get all riled up and start barking like crazy, and we’d have a hell of a hard time calming her down.
-How the HELL do I know what’s in the cookies? How do I know they’re not some brats who like to spike them with Ex-Lax. Ever hear of “Don’t take food from strangers?” I might not know these girls-“T and L Club?” Yeah, that really helps.
-WHY would they “run off?” If you’re going to do something nice, the nice thing to do is stick around.
-Would it have killed them to wait until the following day to go and knock on peoples’ doors?
-Lights on have nothing to do with it. Some people leave lights on even if they’re asleep-they may be expecting someone else in the family to come home, they may do it for security reasons, or just because they like light. They said it was a kitchen light-sometimes I’ll leave the one lamp in the kitchen on. For safety reasons, so I don’t trip and fall in the dark.
-They pounded on the door and when the woman asked who was there, they took off. Maybe she thought someone was leaving a flaming bag of dogshit on her porch! I’d be concerned if someone took off when I asked “Who is it?”
I agree, the girls’ hearts were in the right place-but the way they went about it was really stupid. They definitely used poor judgement.
Now, all that said-she should not have sued, and she should definitely have signed the agreement, accepting the appology.
I figure if you’ve jerked off three times in a row beforehand, you’d be numb enough where that wouldn’t be an issue.
Or you could just use a giant steel dildo.
I initially thought (my own conclusion here) that the apology wasn’t sincere because of the indemnification requirement, which I would assume came via some legalese drafted by a lawyer. Of course, conclusions either way are inherently unreliable when all you’re working with is a single news article.
WRT carelessness, that’s a judgement call. Banging on a door late at night and running away can scare people, even if it’s not done with intent to scare.
I don’t even believe they should have offered to pay her medical bills, unless they had prior knowledge that she had a nervous condition. That she refused to indemnify the families against future suits implies to me that she perhaps sees a source of future cash.
The whole thing is ridiculous. It would have been cheaper for them to go out drinking and get picked up by the cops.
Perhpas I shouldn’t be venting my bad day on this woman, but this is asinine.
They wanted to remain somewhat anonymous? I did the same thing with bags of (storebought) candy when I was a kid in rural Illinois. 'Course, this was 30 years ago.
[childish sing song voice]Someone’s afraid of a lawsuit…[/childish sing song voice]
I must have missed the part about the kids running away. Maybe they waited for a response and then left? So they then got sued for tryihg to be nice. How could they know their neighbor was a spiteful bastard AND a mental case? No good deed shall go unpunished. Good thing I’m not a neighbor. If that house was on fire, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help (I might get sued). If she was getting mauled by an angry wolverine, I’d be cooing “good weasel”. I stand by my initial opinion, that this was a bullshit lawsuit.
tdn : that’s “hear”, not “here”. See? Even grammar is on the wane…
I would offer to pay the ER fees for your damaged hand, but I’m not nice, like these girls are…heh. Wound seems self-inflicted to me–are you on medication or under a doctor’s care? 
Didn’t this happen in the summer? 10:30 on a summer night is not late. Also, there was an 18 y/o in the house who could either call for help in the case of marauders and/or answer the friggin door! I still contend that the girls were punished for a good deed. Maybe they were busy the next day and couldn’t deliver the cookies. Jeebus, are we afraid of cookies, now?
When we first moved in, a neighbor came down with little home-made Easter treats etc., ok-she wanted us to go to her church (we declined) but still, in no way did we suspect the goodies. And they were GOOD.
So, this beastly woman thinks that something bad could have happened to these girls–yo, something DID–That something was YOU, bitch!
I’d be interested in knowing if the judge was a conservative or liberal. The “teach them a lesson” sounds conservative, the loose interpretation of the law sounds liberal.
Granted the girls should have stuck around to deliver them personally. Mysterious cookies left on my doorstep, would have become trash, or I might have eaten one on a dare. But it also seemed they lived in a neighbor, not the sticks.
What crack me up is she also made this comment:
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2691638,00.html
Young said she believes that the girls should not have been running from door to door late at night”
“Something bad could have happened to them," she said.
Something bad did happen… a frivolous lawsuit.
Oh, I guess that will teach children that it’s better to cuss, drink, and dance the night away.
The big question everyone is forgetting is how much money she’ll make on Trick-or-Treat night!!!
:rolleyes:
Yes indeed. They will learn that the weeks and months of repeated door-knocking and bell-ringing at all hours of the day and night that will be visited upon this harpy by local and semi-local wags will be really, really funny.
Good luck with that. If the girls have learned anything from this, you’re about to get clobbered with a $900 lawsuit for harassing and terrorizing them with unsolicited mail.
I agree, a letter of apology that included a request for indemnification would be quite suspect. Of course I could be misinterpreting this myself, but it appears to me as if the apologies and the offer of compensation were completely separate things. According to the article, the girls wrote letters of apology and the families offered to pay her expenses.
And the families asking to be indemnified from any future claims is both reasonable and standard in an offer of settlement. Offering to pay anything at all should have been indicative of at least a certain degree of remorse and acceptance of responsibility. That alone should’ve sufficed. But this woman took it further, then said she hope the girls learned a lesson. As I said before, I think this was her driving motive – she was out to prove some kind of point. She certainly did, but likely not the one she was gunning for.