A 20-year-old woman from my state who’d been missing since August was found in a swamp yesterday; she’d been murdered, probably sexually assulted before that (the link doesn’t say, but on the news they said she was naked, and her clothes were found scattered at the scene). http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=36781 She was last seen alive leaving a bar with an unidentified 35-40 year old man.
While in this case it would be hard prove if she’d been drinking or not, given the state of her body, let’s imagine that they found her within a few hours of her death, and they could do a blood alcohol level test - I’m sure it’s happened many times with other murder victims. Say the test said yes, she was drinking, and furthermore, they had witnesses that said she was served in the bar she’d been in. Even in this case, they did say they might find evidence of what happened from her body, and if the crowd is made up of regulars, it’s remotely possible someone might remember the night in question and if she’d been drinking.
If both those things were true, could her family press charges against the bartender? Not just for serving a minor, but for contributing to the circumstances surounding her death? If there was a civil suit, would there be any chance of the family winning? Should they be able to?
Maybe she didn’t drink, and was perfectly sober when she decided to leave the bar with a man twice her age (not her boyfriend, either) but I can’t help but wonder what cuplabilty the bar shares in this case, and others like it.
Most if not all states provide for a bar to be liable for damages arising out of the acts of their patrons. But (and it’s a pretty big but) the bar has to be shown to have been *negligent *in its contribution to the ensuing mayhem. To prove this, in your example, it would not be enough for someone to have witnessed the victim drinking in the bar. A 20-year old will not become ‘under the influence’ with merely a taste of alcohol. Minimum drinking age is just an arbitrary thing. Physiologically she’s not all that different from a legal drinker. To prove the bar negligent, it would have to be demonstrated that the bar guy KNEW she was under the influence and CONTINUED to serve her. That’s hard to do even in simple DUI cases. In a 9-month old murder case it would be nearly impossible to prove. The best bet is to avoid spreading around the misery and focus on the real problem which is finding and prosecuting the killer, not the bar that the woman voluntarily entered, drank at and left.
Even then, the harm resulting must have been a foreseeable result of the bar’s action, and not the unforeseeable result of another’s independent intervening criminal act. One would have to show that the bar’s conduct was the actual cause of her death (that either overserving her or serving her as a minor actually caused her death), the proximate cause of her death (that this particular harm is one of the normal incidents of the bar’s actions), and the criminal conduct of another was not an independent intervening cause of death. My WAG is that there are way too many causation problems for the young woman’s family to recover from the bar. The causal link from giving a 20 year old a beer to a body decomposing in the woods is pretty scketchy.