There must be billions of public crowded places in the cities of the US with “easy direct access”. Are you saying this is inherently stupid? What do you envisage precisely? Dividing up the entirety of city public space into locked compounds with metal detectors and guards and searches in between or what?
Your post and that of several othes shows the intellectual dishonesty of the entire US and (increasingly) Australian tort systems. Those systems are actually a defacto accident compensation scheme in which anyone injured has a right to be paid a significant amount by any substantial or insured entity in the vicinity. Access to the scheme is dependent upon legal theatre in which the lawyers* pretend it is about negligence when it is really about how badly injured the plaintiff is, and whether they will be destitute if they don’t win, and whether the defendant’s loss if they lose will be dissipated across society. The problem is not that the goal isn’t noble (paying the injured needy) the problem is that the system is massively inefficient, and distorts spending on safety.
If I asked a bunch of people the day before this incident whether (a) movies like Batman would be to blame if they provoked crazy people to conduct mass killings and (b) whether every theatre in the US needed to implement security sufficient to prevent such crazy people (and told them the cost and what it meant for their convenience and for ticket prices) I think almost no one would say yes.
If you ask a bunch of people the same questions *after *an incident like this, with the benefit of hindsight and with a quadraplegic victim in front of them who is going to be destitute unless they answer the questions in the affirmative, then guess what they are going to say?
*(and I am one, by the way, though I work the defendant’s side of the street)
Actually I’d go further than that - how often has somebody snuck in weapons or similar and done any harm to a patron? (eg - the above mentioned scenario of a jealous ex-boyfriend)
If there was violence happening in a theatre on anything other than a very isolated basis of fights breaking out amongst patrons it might change my mind.
Side question: Whatever happened to the “proximate cause” doctrine that stopped these suits as a matter of law? IOW, a judge would rule that even if the theater was negligent in its security, the supervening criminal act of the shooter sufficiently breaks the chain of causation to make the shooter 100% to blame.
The whole “negligence in the air is not enough” and Palsgraf. Does any state still follow this system?
What makes you think it mist foresee the exact nature of the threat? What if it had been two 12 year old boys fighting? What if it was a wino groping young women? Would the theater be off the hook just because no wino had ever groped a young woman before?
If the court has already established a duty to protect on the part of the theater, then who has a* right* to be protected? - The patron. When is that right breached? - When he’s harmed.
Sure the defendant only has a duty to take reasonable steps to protect, but can you show me one step the defendant took here to provide any protection at all?
A theatre can’t preemptively stop two 12 year olds from fighting and shouldn’t be held accountable for that happening. The question is what they do in response to it. What about the police? Oh sure, they got there in 90 seconds. But why weren’t they there in 5 seconds? Couldn’t they have reasonably anticipated this happening? It was a violent movie after all.
Do you know how much glass there is in a grocery store? What if I went in and started chucking bottles at people from right off the shelves? Morgenstern, what should a grocery store do to preemptively stop something like that from happening? Lock up every glass bottle behind plexiglass and you have to ask a clerk with a key to unlock it? It’s one idea.
You know what’s worse? I could go to the cleaning aisle, mix some ammonia and bleach together and kill half the store. Or hell, you know, I can just walk in with some guns and blast away at people. Why not? The doors just slid right open when I walked near, so the store was practically begging me to do it! Why aren’t grocery store security measures more strict?
Wow, that’s diabolical. I’m actually surprised nobody has thought of that and tried it yet. Then the ammonia will be behind a display case along with the Sudafed.
The court has apparently applied a higher standard of care to theater owners, so arguing what might or might not happen in a grocery store is irrelevant to this plaintiff’s case.
Cite?
Oh and an, on a whim, I Googled “standard of care for theatre owners” (without the quotes) and this very post showed up as the #1 hit. I don’t think Google used to be that efficient in its search capabilities.
Try the theatre provided access doors that were locked from the outside, had security for inside the building and out in the parking lot, had cameras in various places in the theatre, and allowed access only to those who had purchased tickets. When you add in the fact that there was no previous history of anything of this sort happening at previous Batman showings, then I’d say they pretty much covered their bases in a reasonable manner.
And, undoubtedly that will be argued to the jury in the theater’s defense.
Edited:
We’ve gone from the original position that the plaintiff had no case to the current position that the plaintiff has a case, but the theater might have a valid defense. It’s tough being a juror, not so much for this plaintiff, but for that father that lost his 6 year old daughter, how much do you think sympathy will enter the jury’s mindset?
You skipped over the question you quoted. Should stores prosecute shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law if they hang a sign saying they will? It not, how is this different?
I know, I know, I’m an evil bastard for not thinking of the poor innocent children that will be kidnapped/run over/lost forever if a door marked “Emergency exit, Alarm will sound” doesn’t, in fact, have an alarm.
The camera for instance. A security camera that records (IE, not watched live) might be useful in solving a purse snatching, but merely recording the events of that early morning did nothing to prevent harm to those patrons.
The rear door was allowed to remain open for a period of time while the shooter dressed, and armed himself, so the door was a failure as a preventative measure with respect to entering the theater.
Would an usher have made a difference in that theater? Could he at least have turned on the lights so people could see to exit the theater? Could he have reached and closed the door before the gunman reentered? Could he have sounded an alarm before the carnage started? Or would he too have been a victim?
That cite is from the 1st Circuit, which is inapplicable precedent for Colorado’s 10th Circuit. Supreme Court denied Cert.
Sentence two of the analysis makes it clear that “reasonbly forseeable” is based upon past experiences. There were no past experiences to draw upon in this case.
The case you cited was about one group of people antagonizing another group of people throughout the entire movie before escalating things in the parking lot after the show, all without the movie theatre’s intervention. I fail to see its applicability to what happened in Aurora during the course of possibly 3 minutes.
I never said that. I asked it they were really steps? If they were, were they sufficient to do a single thing to prevent harm to individuals in the theater? I don’t see the goal post moving, but I do see the ball in your court.
You think this isn’t going to come up in a jury trial?
No. It’s not going to come up in a jury trial. It will either be thrown out on summary judgement or it will settle long before trial because the theater owners will swallow their pride and pay money to a fuck nugget rather than risk bankruptcy. Then the folks in Aurora will pay $30 a ticket to cover the cost of the settlement and to ensure that the theatres can employ an usher for every film and every door in the place, lest they get sued again.