Articles Posted in General

When I tell them, they don’t like what they hear. I try my best to explain, and usually they do understand, but they are never happy about it. Sometimes (thankfully not often) they even become angry.

What am I talking about? Turning a case down. You see I, like all other Central New York personal injury and medical malpractice lawyers, must sometimes tell potential clients that I am declining to take their personal injury or medical malpractice case. Many factors come into play in deciding whether to accept a personal injury or medical malpractice case. In the end, we lawyers need to make a business decision, based on a cost-benefit analysis.

What goes into that analysis? Since we are paid on a contingency fee basis (generally 1/3 of whatever we recover for the client) we need some reasonable assurance that: (1) we can win the case; (2) the injury is significant enough to warrant a jury verdict high enough so that 1/3 of it will “pay” for our time litigating it; and (3) the at-fault party has either enough insurance coverage or a “deep pocket” so we can collect on a judgment.

Tort law works! I blogged about the Boy Scout case a few weeks ago, but I need to revisit it here. The jury has sent the Boy Scouts of America a powerful messge! This Friday, the jury, who heard and carefully considered all the evidence, slammed the Boy Scouts of America with an $18.5 million punitive damages verdict for having allowed a former assistant Scoutmaster to sexually abuse him as a boy. The jury had already found, in the first stage of the trial, that the Boy Scouts conduct in allowing a known sex abuser to be an assistant Scoutmaster was outrageous and reckless.

How reckless? Consider this: After the molester admitted to a Boy Scouts official that he had already molested 17 boys, the Boy Scouts of America kept him on as Scoutmaster, and kept him in contact (to say the least!) with the boys, where he went on to molest, among others, the plaintiff in this case.

This $18.5 verdict was in addition to the $1.4 million in compensatory damages the jury already awarded to the sex abuse victim earlier this month. Compensatory damages are meant to compensate the pain and suffering, medical expenses, lost wages and other direct losses to the plaintiff. With punitive damages, however, the focus is not on compensating the victim, but on the behavior of the defendant. Punitive damages do what their name suggests; they PUNISH the wrongdoer, here the Boy Scouts of America, for very wrongful, reckless or deliberately harmful conduct. In New York the way we describe the kind of behavior that calls for punitive damages (also known as “exemplary damages”) is “conduct that evinces utter indifference or conscious disregard for the safety of others.” Punitive damages are meant to deter similar behavior in the future.

Today I received an email with the photograph depicted here as a “joke”. It is clever for sure, but no laughing matter for those who have been victimized by Catholic priest sexual abuse.

I also read in several media reports today that Pope Benedict XVI met with Catholic Church sex-abuse victims on the island of Malta and promised them, tearfully, that the Catholic Church would “seek justice for pedophile priests” and take “effective measures” to protect kids from future abuse. The Pope prayed with these abused children-turned-adults and assured them that the Church was doing, and will do, “all in its power to investigate allegations, to “BRING TO JUSTICE THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR ABUSE”. The Vatican offered no details of what measures it would take to carry this out.

But here’s the key question in my mind: Will the Vatican bring ITSELF to “justice”? After all, who are those most “responsible for abuse”, the priests with unfortunate pedophilic desires so strong that recidivism is almost a given, or the passionless Church hierarchy who knowingly, deliberately, and cold-heartedly covered all this abuse up, shuffling sexual predators from parish to parish, and even from country to country, where they could resume their violence upon innocent children?

Ok, I have written on this topic very recently, but I can’t help it if the topic just stays in the news. I am talking about the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse lawsuit crisis, which I just blogged about a few days ago.

But an article in the New York Times today sheds some new light on the crisis. It explains why the Church’s sexual abuse claim crisis is happening so much later in Europe than in the United States. As you will recall, the crisis peaked in the U.S. about a decade ago. Why are the European abused boys, now men, who were molested or raped back in the 60’s and 70’s, only now coming forward? The New York Times attributes the delay in part to the fact that victims in Europe cannot expect significant compensation in Court, as can victims in the U.S. The Times quotes a German lawyer representing 15 sexually abused boys who says the highest civil judgment any child victim of severe sexual abuse has ever received in Germany was less than $70,000.

$70,000 to compensate a man who as a boy suffered “sever sexual abuse” at the hands of a priest! And that’s top dollar over there! And for a crime that totally changes a boy’s life, for the worse, forever. No wonder those abused kids/men have kept their mouths shut for so long over there. Why put yourself through the emotional trauma of disclosing publicly what you shamefully endured privately for so long —- for a maximum of $70,000? Hardly seems worth it to me.

Ok, I plead guilty to not being a “tort reformer”. I generally do NOT support eliminating or even reducing the rights of the seriously injured to recover compensation, including for pain and suffering, from “tortfeasors”, that is, those who injured them through wrongdoing, negligence or carelessness. That being said, I think the State of North Carolina needs a little tort reform.

The local newspapers have been reporting on a curious case of a Wells College dean (Aurora, New York) who was sued by the spurned wife of the man she now resides with. The heartbroken cast-off convinced a North Carolina jury to award her $9 million for her loss (must have been quite a man!). It probably didn’t help that the alleged husband-thief missed the trial (she says she was not notified in time). Now the temptress is asking the judge to toss out the verdict.

Could this happen in New York? No. But it could have happened before 1935, which is the year New York, like almost every other state in the Union, abandoned the archaic “alienation of affection” tort, which allowed a deserted spouse to sue his or her adulterous spouse’s lover to recover damages.

Sexual abuse lawsuits are in the news a lot these days. It is now common knowledge that some priests, under the Catholic Church’s employ, were busy (between masses?) molesting and even raping boys. The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has even reached the doorstep of the Pope! The Pope, they say, knew (before he became Pope) that these priests had sexually abused young boys, yet was complicit in a cover-up. The Church allowed the pedophile priests to continue to work with the boys even after it knew of their track record for abuse. The Church moved the abusers from one parish to another where they then abused other boys.

The victims have brought sexual abuse lawsuits not only against the individual priests that abused them, but their employer, the Church. Any compensation from these lawsuits will not come from the priests, who generally have no assets. It will come from the “deep pocket”, the Church. And rightly so, since the Church failed so miserably to protect these boys from these sexual predators.

What do the Boy Scouts of America have in common with the Catholic Church? Quite a bit, according to a sexual abuse lawsuit being tried right now in Oregon. We’re not talking about a suit against a local Boy Scout Troop, but the big buys, the actual Boy Scouts of AMERICA. The difference between this lawsuit and others that have been filed across the nation is its breadth and scope. The lawsuit accuses Boy Scouts of America of a cover-up. It alleges that the Boy Scouts of America allowed troop leaders to continue to work with scouts after they knew they had abused scouts, even sometimes after they had been convicted of sexual abuse. According to the victims’ lawyers, the Boy Scouts of America moved the abusers from one troop to another where they then abused other boys. Sound familiar? (hint – Catholic Church).