Consider the attorney’s failure to do so and the possibility that he may face a lawsuit claiming he was negligent in the handling of plaintiff’s case by not pursuing all possible defendants, it’s really reasonable. Yeah, it’s a litigious society and tort reform doesn’t seem to be coming.
-How many security guards is a “reasonable effort”? One may not have been enough.
-The doors (IIRC) were one way exits. It was the fact he propped the door open to come back in that created the opportunity.
-What if the gunman ends up being the employee? (Which would actually give the claimant a better leg to stand on, but then completely negates the theatre’s effort to offer safety by having the parking be “Employees Only”.)
How would you weigh these things if you were on the jury?
The OP’s question isn’t what would have worked. The question is whether it was fair and reasonable for this plaintiff to sue the theater, doctor and WB.
Otherwise, your question is really beyond my ability to answer. The lawyer who advances such a claim (by filing the suit) would need to produce experts to testify as to whether the expense of such “defenses” outweighed the risk of such damage, as well as other experts testifying about possible options and measures that could (should) have been employed.
If the jury found, for instance, that there was an inexpensive option that could have made a difference, then there is the likelihood that the theater would be found negligent in this matter. If, on the other hand, the jury decides that nothing short of the USMC pistol team sitting in the front row would have made a difference, then the jury could probably find the theater was not negligent in their duty to providing a safe environment. They will weigh the options, the cost to the theater of those options, the foreseeability of the necessity of those option as well as the probably benefit from having them in place.
It ultimately comes down to that jury sitting in a room deliberating the facts and voting according to their individual findings. A scary thought to add to this…, in many jurisdictions civil juries need not return unanimous verdicts nor must they be composed of 12 people.
Bambi has a disturbing scene and the Sound of Music is set during Nazism. Far too traumatic for this guy.
An inexpensive option to thwarting the potential actions of a gunman who had planned this out for ages?
(That’s not directed at you, just the “Oh for god’s sake” feeling this line of lawyer-type thinking gives me.)
It’s not that this is a clear cut case by any means. The plaintiff will probably argue it’s negligent to have a door that can be used to enter a dark theater with little or no problem by someone intent on doing harm to a theater goer. Whether it’s a jealous boyfriend intent on paying back that guy sitting beside his ex, or a thug wanting to grab a purse and run. Considering that, do you think the theater had an obligation to consider the reasonableness of having that back door available as a means of access to the theater? Is it reasonably foreseeable that someone could do one of those things, or something similar? You’re on the jury, you get a vote.
he’s an asshole and his lawyer is a whore
Hey, be careful there. Bubbadog will be offended that you’re insulting a victim.
What I find rather creepy is that the guy (or perhaps his family) didn’t just hire a lawyer, but a publicist as well.
Either of whom could just have bought a damn ticket, and got in through the front.
Unless anyone believes that cinemas should run psychological profiling and full criminal record checks on everyone before they enter, I can’t see how cinemas have either the duty or the capacity to protect the public from the public.
Pockets deep enough to pay for a team of good lawyers to defend the reputation of the company and one of their cash cow franchises.
I noticed this quote from the article linked in the OP:
Now, I’ve been reading a lot about this case, but unless I’ve missed a lot I don’t know what orifice the lawyer pulled this out of. I understand the idea of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, but this seems like a pretty specific allegation. At this point has it even been confirmed that Holmes was seeing any doctors about his mental health? AFAIK, there hasn’t even been any confirmation that he was on any medication whatsoever. Let alone assuming that the doctors weren’t monitoring said medication. If the lawyer wants to include any of Holmes’ possible doctor(s) in the lawsuit, could he have used more general terms?
The article in the OP was published the morning of July 24th, so the lawsuit was filed before that. I googled around and I found this article which states that:
It seems that the lawsuit was filed before there was any confirmation that Holmes was even seeing a doctor.
I also found this article, which states (my emphasis added in bold):
Since the package he sent to the shrink was found in the mailroom and not until after the shooting, I think it’s unlikely that they could have predicted an “imminent threat”. I mean, anything’s possible, but I personally doubt a psychiatrist who is familiar with their professional obligations would fail to report an obvious threat (the psychiatrist is a member of the campus-based “behavioral assessment and threat assessment team,” which helps faculty and staff deal with “individuals who may be threatening, disruptive or otherwise problematic).
This lawyer really isn’t looking at the big picture about what this lawsuit will do to his legal career.
Talk about Karpel tunnel vision.
Do you not think he is being prodded by the noblest of professions*? I’ll hang my hat that he is…
*In short, the scum of the earth in their majority.
NO, the attorney can be sanctioned for Frivolous lawsuits ( legal ethics | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute ) - So throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks is not a legitimate law practice.
WB = they probably have a cut and paste response to “you’re bad movie made my un-handled, un-socialized angel do bad things”; the shooter had not yet seen the movie (remember all trailers would have been PG); WB has no direct control over the environment of the theater. Their first action will likely to be to have themselves removed from the case. They’ll provide their cut/paste legal argument for how they had nothing to do with it. And it will be up to this attorney to defeat WB’s argument. So the attorney either knew this was a throw everything at the wall addition and wanted the publicity OR the attorney is an idiot.
The Movie Theater = Liable to provide reasonable and prudent safety to patrons. Unless CO has an on-going epidemic of people shooting up theaters, reasonable and prudent does not mean that they were liable to prevent a planned attack by a mentally unstable person. How would any business survive such a requirement? As has been stated above, fire suppression is required in public buildings because fires do happen in a statistically significant frequency. Alarmed exit doors in an unregulated public place are not even a common standard (think of the added expenses, etc). Examples of where you see them are Hospitals (regulated for privacy, drug theft, infant abductions), Police stations, etc. A theater is a public place. I’m sure many people use the exit doors to avoid the lobby crowd or even duck outside for a smoke while waiting for the movie to begin. Good luck proving that it was reasonable and prudent to alarm the doors in a public theater when there is no case history of gunmen using them to mow down a crowd of viewers.
The Doctor = This is the only place that he MIGHT have a case, and that is ONLY if the guy said he was going to go out and shoot up some place (really, he needed to make a more specific threat than that, but the vague threat might sway a jury). Since she was part of the school and he had dropped out a month ago and he mailed her a package (instead of providing it at a visit). I have to wonder just how recently she’d even seen him.
Generic John Does = You can’t add a John Doe unless you are alleging that that John Doe has done something in relation to the case. You can’t just add three additional place holders without a specific action associated to them. The “John Doe” is because the person doesn’t know the real name (e.g. you have a screen name and still need to execute a search warrant against an ISP to find the real name)
That this guy has hired a PR agent also makes this look like a money grab.
I don’t hold an 18yo responsible for being used by the attorney, but I really hope the attorney gets reamed by the judicial system before this is all over.
The theater is not obligated to protect its patrons from insane gunmen. His expectation that they do so is not reasonable. They are not a personal protection service.
It’s an action movie! What exactly is your point? That Warner Brothers should have made the movie so boring, tedious, and dull that there was no chance of confusion?
This is the fault of the shooter, not the theater, Warner Brothers, etc.
I would disagree. The theater is obligated to protect the patrons from reasonably foreseeable harm. The fact that an insane gunman isn’t as foreseeable as perhaps a homeless, mentally unstable guy wandering in the back door with a knife is irrelevant. Harm to a patron is reasonably foreseeable when the theater design allows *unsecured, direct access * to a dark theater full of people. It is a recipe for disaster from an unlimited amount of possible scenarios. It isn’t the degree of that disaster, but the foreseeability of potential harm that will be the issue with respect to foreseeability. You can be assured the attorney will be hammering that point home if there is a trial.
I’m wondering if something as simple as having the theater lights go on when someone opened the back door would have helped in this situation?
Why do they put doors in the door frames of movie theater exits?
If I defeat the sprinkler system in a school, sabotage the air bags in a rental company’s cars or defeat the closing mechanism and/or lock on a theater’s exit doors, none of those businesses had any obligation to see that coming.