Sharon Smith, the gay partner of the woman mauled to death in SF, is suing the dog owners.
Can unmarried live-ins of any persuasions do this? Should they be able to? Should sexual orientation OR marital status matter? Why or why not?
Are there any CA locals who can confirm or deny the inference in the cite-- that the bill passing through the legislarure will grant this right to gay/lesbian couples, but NOT heterosexual couples?
We can do either:
allow homosexuals to marry, thus gaining the special rights accorded spouses.
develop a patchwork of laws/rulings to grant these rights one-by-one.
Don’t know about the law, but I suspect it is another patchwork work-around.
The general thought is:
Hetero’s can marry, thereby gaining special status under the law
Homo’s (note the apostrophy - no flaming) cannot marry, so how do we acknowledge their relationships? SF has a ‘Domestic Partners’ law, under which 2 adults can register, thereby entitling one to be covered under the other’s employee health benefits (United Airlines threatened to pull its HUGE maintanance facility over this one).
Wouldn’t it just be easier to allow people to marry as they see fit? Spread the joys of divorce among the largest population possible!
There’s a link to the California Assembly page in the article in your OP! Just click on it and look for AB25. The gist is that you have to be a registered “domestic partner” before you can claim survivor’s rights. I’m afraid that I don’t know the mechanisms of how you’d go about registering that, but maybe someone else feels like surfing through California law to find out. I would assume that you can’t have more than one domestic partner at a time, and that there’s some rigamarole involved.
Opposite sex live-in couples can only make use of this provision if they are over 62 and meet some other requirements. But if heterosexuals want these rights, all they have to do is get married . . .
One might also note that there are varying grounds for varying legal claims. I would have to be the heir by blood, adoption, or legally recognized marriage of someone to assert a claim on his or her estate other than through a bequest in his or her will. However, if there was a commonly known verbal agreement between us that I could pasture my goats on his or her field in perpetuity, and his or her heirs attempted to bar me from this, I might be able to sue on the grounds that that agreement in perpetuity is binding on the heirs as well. (Actually, there’s a provision against agreements in perpetuity somewhere in real estate law.)
If a person could show that the death of another person in some way caused some form of injury, including financial, to him or her as well, he or she would probably have grounds for a wrongful death suit, regardless of whether the deceased and the injured person were in a domestic partner relationship or whatever. And the grounds for demonstrating such an injury would be factual rather than based on legal agreements – it doesn’t matter whether it’s my wife, GayGuy’s domestic partner, YoungStr8Woman’s live-in boyfriend, or CollegeKid’s (platonic) roommate – if that person’s death caused the person in the possessive case to suffer some form of financial loss, even to the extent of being unable to make the rent on his/her own, he or she has grounds to seek relief for his/her damages in almost every jurisdiction.
yes. A wrongful death suit. Those involving spouses are usually more about ‘loss of companionship’ and ‘emotional distress’
(IOW, nookie), and bring damages far in excess of strictly loss of income.
As long as gays are not allowed to be spouses, these remedies are (generally) not available to them.
Let those who wish to marry GET married. Simple solution, and then we could go on to sloving the rest of the world’s problems 
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No. Most countries/states intentionally seek to limit the class of people who can bring an action for wrongful death. Just because “every man’s death diminishes me,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that I should have standing to seek redress in court for my injury.
Suppose, for example, that one of my best pizza delivery customers is killed in a traffic accident by a negligent driver. Though I, too, have suffered a loss, the law doesn’t allow me to seek redress from the driver for my reduced pizza sales even though they were caused by the driver’s negligence.
This is a silly example. However, it illustrates the point. I’m not saying that gay couples shouldn’t have a right to sue for wrongful death. I am saying that a line must be drawn somewhere and that whoever ends up just the other side of that line isn’t going to like it.
The estate of Smith should be able to sue. If this woman is representing the estate, she should be able to sue.
Smith is still alive. The dead woman was named Whipple, I believe.
Can the estate of a murdered person sue the murderer for wrongful death?
yojimboguy: But of course. Indeed, several SoCal newspapers are already bringing up the dread precedent of “Estate of Nicole Brown Simpson v. OJ.”
Personally, I think justice would be done if Smith was allowed to sue the dog owners for damages in the wrongful death of her partner–it seems like fair law to me. But I’m afraid it would open up a huge can of worms regarding partner-rights, same-sex and otherwise, and cause them to be subject to abuse by the unscrupulous. Example: say I have a male room-mate, and he’s murdered. I could falsely claim we were live-in lovers and sue the murderer. You say we weren’t in a relationship? Hey, prove me wrong.
I think this is case is a little different from “standard” domestic-partner issues such as insurance or company health-care plans. In the above case, I’d have to put my male room-mate down as the primary beneficiary of the plans. Perhaps a legal document, akin to a will, could be drawn up: “I hereby designate <name> as my legal partner, and (among other things) in the event of my unlawful death allow him/her to pursue claims against the party(ies) responsible.” Considering that the alternative is to theoretically allow everybody to sue on anyone else’s behalf, and that we are after all talking about California, I fear that such a solution will not be found.
Duke, if you’re the one bringing the law suit, the onus would be on you to prove, to the satisfaction of the jury, that you were in fact in a relationship with the deceased. Simply asserting it likely wouldn’t be enough - you would need evidence that prior to the death, the two of you were in a relationship.
Northern Piper: What, exactly, would constitute as “legal evidence” that a relationship is occurring? That’s why I’m saying some kind of legal document would be of use.
Well, I’ve had some marginal involvement in this type of issue, and I would say that there are at least three categories of facts, other than a formal “life partnership” agreement like you suggest. Note that these factors can be relevant to both opposite-sex and same-sex relationships.
First, there’s the basic question of living arrangements. Do the two people live together? Do they share a bedroom? (However much we dance around it, nookie, or absence thereof, is usually highly important in these cases ). Do they take holidays together? Do they go grocery shopping together? Those sort of everyday activities are pretty suggestive of the nature of the relationship.
Second, financial matters. Mere roomates tend to split expenses rigourously, each pay for their own long distance calls, have completely separate financial arrangements. If two people have a joint account, a joint credit card, and an integrated budget, that’s often taken as a sign of a relationship that’s deeper than simple friendship or a mere living arrangement
Third, how they hold themselves out to the community. Do their friends, family or co-workers know that they’re a couple? Do they wear promise rings or some other jewellry symbolising a relationship? Do they refer to each other as “my guy” or some equivalent? (I appreciate that this factor may be easier for a hetero couple to demonstrate than a gay couple, given social prejudices, but even if a gay couple is “discreet,” there are usually some close friends who know about the relationship.)
None of these are decisive, and I’m sure that on the facts of a particular case other indicia might be relevant. These are just some of the factors that in my experience courts have looked at to decide if two people were a couple.