Wrongful Death Litigation
Almost always, a person’s death is a tragedy. And if someone causes the death of another, we expect the criminal justice system to find the person responsible and either convince them to plead guilty or to hold a trial at which a jury determines their guilt and punishes their crime.
But people can also sue the responsible person or entity in a civil trial. The trial doesn’t bring the person back to life or even send the responsible party to jail. It is just a procedure to make the defendant pay money, which sounded strange to me when I first heard it. Who cares about money when someone has died?
The answer is many people, and not just because they want money, but because they want the responsible party to face all of the consequence of their negligence or intentional misconduct.
Why should you read this post about wrongful death litigation?
You want to know if litigation over death was any more interesting than litigation over contracts.
You want some creative ideas on defendants to sue.
You want to see a painting of a skull.
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StillLifeWithASkull.jpg
Who Can Sue
In many personal injury suits, the plaintiff - the person bringing the lawsuit - is the injured party. This is the person who has “standing” to bring the lawsuit. Some other person, a friend or relative, generally cannot sue for someone else’s injury.
In wrongful death lawsuits, however, the dead person (often called the “decedent”) cannot bring the lawsuit herself because of how difficult it is for dead people to contact a lawyer from beyond the grave and the lack of interest dead people have for money. Instead, once someone dies, the state designates someone as the administrator of the person’s estate. And that person may have the authority to bring lawsuits on behalf of the dead person pursuant to various statutes like this Virginia one or this New York one.
Who is Responsible
A simple wrongful death action may involve one defendant, the evil murderer who shot the decedent. But it is the rare murderer that has enough money to pay a large judgment. And so plaintiffs may not bring a long, expensive lawsuit against ordinary individuals. One notable exception was the famous athlete O.J. Simpson, who was found liable at a wrongful death trial and still struggled to satisfy the large judgment against him.
So if wrongful death lawsuits against people are often not economically viable, who are common wrongful death defendants? The answer is often companies, for two reasons.
First, companies have deeper pockets. If you get a million dollar judgment against a person, they may not have the money to pay. But a million dollar judgment against a hotel or a pharmaceutical company or an airline or any company that has insurance? The odds are much greater that these defendants can and will pay judgments.
Second, people seek justice when someone dies. And while the police may arrest an individual with a gun who deliberately murdered someone, they are much less likely to arrest a business that was negligent in preventing someone’s death. As a result, people pursue these claims in civil litigation, rather than let them go when the government does not address them.
Negligence
Many wrongful death claims are predicated on a theory of negligence. In many states, a plaintiff establishes that the defendant is liable for negligence when she owes a duty to the plaintiff, breaches that duty, and the breach is the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injury.
Therefore, to prevail on a wrongful death claim, the plaintiff needs to establish that the defendant owed a duty to the decedent. What does that mean? A famous case, Palsgraf v. Long Island Rail Road, decided that it meant that, if a defendant reasonably foresees that its actions could cause an injury to a certain group of people, it owes a duty to those people. Defendants do not owe unlimited duties, though. Many court cases have decided when harm is too unforeseeable for the law to impose a duty. For example, in Connecticut, someone who sets a fire does not owe a duty to prevent injuries to the firefighters who come to put the fire out. And a New York court held a water company that failed to supply water owes no duty to someone whose property was damaged in a fire that could have been put out by the company’s water.
One major difference between a wrongful death action and a criminal case is that a plaintiff need only provide her case by a preponderance of the evidence, showing it is slightly more likely than not that the defendant is liable. The prosecutor in a criminal trial must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a much higher burden. As a result, a defendant’s guilt at a criminal trial can be used against her at a civil trial, but it is possible for someone to be civilly liable but not criminally guilty.
Damages
So what happens if the defendant is found liable? They don’t go to jail, but they may owe money. But how much money?
A jury may decide that amount, calculating factors like the income that the decedent would have earned had she stayed alive, funeral expenses, and in some cases, some amount to compensate for the plaintiff’s emotional distress and loss of companionship.